This just popped up in my feed. I gotta say I love the format of this video. It felt like hearing my college professors breakdown a complex topic and using the veil of cyberpunk to explain it.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism. Please get educated.
I like the idea of V using the tech and their system against those who have power and control. This is a central idea in Watch_Dogs too. Using the ctOS system against the people who helped create it and currently maintain it. “I’ll use their city against them.”
This is the true definition of being woke and I’m here for it, I appreciate the comparison honestly because we basically have the blueprint of what we “might” need to do eventually
there is something to that dystopian feel, even though night city is a corporate mess, we are still attracted to it. Always been interesting to me how we find comfort in these dark futuristic settings, and cyberpunk presents it really well. The game makes you feel like another nobody trying to make it to the top, and the beautiful yet uninviting nature of the city strengthens that feeling. I also like the depressive nature of all this games endings, even if you made it to the top you will die and there is no way you can stop it. When you are at the bottom you wanna make it to the top, but once you reach that point you want to go back, you can never be truly happy.
I suppose it's because you get shit on by corporations in both the real world and in fictional settings - at least in fictional dystopia universes, you get to have a laser eye
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism.
You're attracted to it because regardless of all of it's issues the Cyberpunk world refuses to be stagnant Since the late 80's the entire world has been very VERY stagnant especially the US, almost coasting if you will on a loop that doesn't end. A LOT of that is by design as we long ago exhausted the marxist socialist wave we were riding on thanks to that bastard FDR from the post war, and moving past it would require both work(which politicians hate doing) and an open refutation of the economic and political horror of the past 70 years and NOBODY wants to acknowledge that since heads would literally roll if the common public were ever told they were deliberately lied to and manipulated their entire lives. Pondsmith and his friends went out of their way to bake in the reality of economics and politics into their world that we flagrantly refuse and obfuscate in our own. As a result things keep progressing and moving even when they are revisions(like the crash or the 3rd war), stagnation is not only seen as disgusting in their world but something to fear almost specifically because they dont want to end up like our world. THAT is why basically anyone who dives in pines for it almost instantly, it eschews the disgusting stagnation we have been drowning in since the 90's and gives you a well established world to exist in that constantly reinvents itself and refuses to stand still, the ecological horrors, the sicknesses, diseases, cyberware malfunctions, mental anguish/exhaustion from the net, homicide rate, hopelessness, and backstabbing be damned because despite all that the world is still moving forward despite it's technofeudalism because you can ALWAYS change your lot. It may come with strings, it may come with severe insecurity, it may cost you many precious things, but if you want it bad enough you can still go get it and if luck is there you'll do it. Deep down in the deepest recesses of both our genetic code and our minds we HATE standing still, (farmers are the only real example of directly defying this and even then they mostly have to trick themselves by shutting themselves off from the rest of the world) and when you are faced with something like Cyberpunk where that stagnation doesn't exist your mind screams for it
I appreciate the perspective. This was great. I always saw Cyberpunk as the extreme opposite: a 20th century Libertarian’s warning for 21st century corporatism. That being said, your points are very valid. The funny thing is libertarianism and communism can share common concerns, albeit for different reasons.
Most of my discussions of cyberpunk have been with communists, skewing my perception a bit. but yes, there's definitely a libertarian bent to a lot of it.
there's a lore shard in the game that alludes to night city as a libertarian hellscape. it does in some ways appear libertarian but i see it as a criticizing libertarianism as well
By libertarians do you mean pathetic right-wing weirdos who stole the term from leftist anarchists or the actual libertarians? Because the former don't have any consistent concerns at all. Their entire ideology is based on inadvertently creating a feudalist society because that is exactly what the capitalist version of libertarianism leads to and a person has to be brain-broken to think otherwise. Hoarding is at the heart of this system, and those who hoard the most will easily gain the greatest monopoly. They are just replacing the government with a few oligarchs who control everything. I can't even imagine how utterly horrible infrastructure is going to be under this system lol. Now, if we are talking about leftist anarchists, then that is a different question altogether. A much more interesting question I would say.
@@filidhdeklend893Corporatism is capitalism. Show me when capitalism worked for people and didn't involve a shit ton of unions fighting for worker's rights and pay.
Congratulations on your 1.000 subscribers man, I knew that your channel would grown since I first found you thanks to your "Drakas" videos. Now you really make a good analysis about the politics of cyberpunk, it's sad that it's seems we are going to that kind of future but without the cool cyborg augmentations. Still I'm optimistic that what ever the big "corps" are planning it's gonna fail spectacular and explode in their faces.
We are not going in that direction, if we are we would have hit it a decade ago. Cyberpunk is incompatible with stagnation, and our timeline is rampant with the stuff
The EIC popping up here is a surprising and interesting insight that I don't often see correlated with the economic freebooting of cyberpunk. Very thought provoking.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism. Please get educated.
Mr Robot isn't cyberpunk. You can't be cyberpunk without having a cyberpunk aesthetic. Not to mention, Mr Robot takes place in our day and time ... or 10 years ago (it starts in 2015).
@@3choblast3r4 What constitute "cyberpunk aesthetics"? If you mean the conventional neon lights & rains & some alien super techs, than that would be very simplistic. It's more than that, especially the theme of urban jungle & brutalistic nature of cyberpunk looks. MR ROBOT definitely has all that & add more to the Eastern culture style to some aspects. But the biggest spiritual aspects for me about cyberpunk is the cyber & punk aspects. In it's very nature it's the very "punk" attitudes that revolves around cyber-tech-digital world & MR ROBOT has the true essence of cyber-punk. Also Cyberpunk don't always end up in the "future" timeline. It could be very well within our IRL timeline especially many older cyberpunk series predicted our future looks in 2020s & so on with its retro tech imaginary.
@@crozraven No, bud. Cyberpunk is indeed the neon lights, neo kitsch clothing and hyper capitalist easthetic. (often also some sort of human integration with tech, robotic limbs etc) When you remove that, you're left with sci fi. You can make sci fi with all the themes of cyberpunk but remove the aesthetic and it's not cyberpunk. You can add the aesthetic to most sci fi and make it cyberpunk'ish even without any of the themes. Cyberpunk is all about style over substance, and not in a bad way. Part of it is that 80's early 90's hollywood cool. There is very little cyberpunk and even less modern cyberpunk (altered carbon is cyberpunk, movies like Mute are cyberpunk). But Mr Robot is neither sci fi or cyberpunk. It's got a lot of brutalist architecture and stuff sure. But .. that's just real life bro. And I say this as someone that often says we're close to living in a cyberpunk world. Mr Robot is set in 2015. It's neither science fiction nor does it have the correct aesthetic. It's inspired by the aesthetic somewhat but that's because modern hacker/tech culture in general is influenced by it. The movie Hackers is more cyberpunk than Mr robot. As I said, there is little real cyberpunk. In literature the most authentic cyberpunk is probably still the sprawl trilogy (haven't read Takeshi Kotesh yet. And snow crash is garbage that makes fun of and satirizes cyberpunk). It's a style that really started with 80's hollywood sci fi movies. You can't really have cyberpunk without the sci fi element to it. Because that would basically make John Wick cyberpunk. It would make a lot of movies set in modern day Japan cyberpunk.
What we need to develop is the device that’s the opposite of a 3D Printer; the machine into which you can throw your waste and broken products and be delivered the materials that you then feed into your additive manufacturing machine to make new stuff.
Congrats on reaching 1,000 subscribers! I first discovered your channel through your Draka videos and I was one of your first 100 subscribers to boot. I love your content, man!
@@feralhistorianSpeaking of that, I recently went through the Stone Dogs on Audible and remembered an excellent part between Eric and President Hiero where they basically explain that they neither don't want to start the Final War nor end the Protracted Struggle merely because they was such a mammoth effort put into it (corporate profits, careers, whole lives, etc.) that it became a self-consuming and expanding beast. It definitely remind me of how our timeline's Cold War was fought. Probably a topic that could be covered if you are so inclined.
For an easier explanation of the cyberpunk genre in relation to capitalism can be found by a RUclipsr named JustWrite in his video “ Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, and the Relevancy of Cyberpunk.” For even more info, I recommend “Is The US Becoming A Dystopia?” By RUclipsr SecondThought
That puts you ahead of the game of most of the people that like to pretend they understand everything while being clueless. Being curious and humble is the best kind of flex. 👍🏼
This video popping up in my algorithm was the best thing to happen to me this month! I’ve binged almost all your recent videos and I really hope you keep making them.
I dunno, Star Trek did a lot of the heavy lifting for people. We need more media like that, hopeful and willing to not need serious conflict in every episode, because a society that works that well for everyone should be pretty damn peaceful and great to live in. Leave the real drama for the capitalists. You don't know how many times I've heard people unironically say "we need another war, people are growing soft, demanding more money while working fast food, etc."
@@nickv1212I reckon the people who say shit like "wE nEeD aNoTHeR wAR!" are the least likely to fight in it themselves. It's the type of shit people who never served say just so they can look tough on the internet because they lost their shit when they saw a pride flag sticker on a car.
@@altechelghanforever9906May I direct you towards Theodore Roosevelt. Who was hardly alone in that in his day. Mind, his opinion changed when, over the relatively brief period the US was involved in WWI, his sons were all killed or maimed.
@@nickv1212So since Star Trek is a prosperous socialist utopia, does that mean a thriving sci fi fictional capitalist society would prove capitalist right ?
I enjoyed this take, it was very different. I think you missed a few little details within the game itself and of the setting the game is in. 1) Most endings of the game (other than siding with Arisaka) result in Arisaka being destroyed. Not in one day and it's not obvious what's happening unless you know the context. Yorinobu Arisaka is a character the game stresses to the player spent time on the streets being a gang leader. The game asks "why?" The answer is quiet and hidden as everyone's true selves are hidden in the game. Yorinobu was told by his father what the corporation was for, what Yorinobu's life mission would be... To use Arisaka to do what the Japanese Imperial army could not. Yorinobu refused this and refused his father's evil. He tried to take down his father with open rebellion. When that failed he feigned defeat and returned to try to take down his father's creation from within. If you pick the Corpo start of the game your boss orders a hit on members of the European Space Council to delay a vote that would have revoked Arisaka's license to have colonies on Luna. V mentions a "mole" in the very first conversation. But what did that mole reveal? The creator of the setting, Mike Pondsmith reveals on his in game radio station "Morro Rock Radio." Arisaka was building an illegal weapon of mass destruction, mass driver. Something the ESA does not allow anyone but them to have. Militech discovered this, but who let them in to discover it? Yes, Yorinobu. The whole time Yorinobu was doing things to destroy his fathers creation. Leaking the mass drivers secrets is one of them. Selling the Relic to netwatch was another small victory. When he seizes power after act 1 you discover notes in the world indicating that he is doing all sorts of operations around Night city to agitate war with Militech. And if you finish the game without siding with Arasaka, the reveal of them stealing people's skills and souls destroys them financially... and word of war with Militech is on the wind. Yorinobu won. He never gave up fighting evil. This is the real messaging of the game, not some collectivist stuff but fighting to decide who you are. Yorinobu wouldn't have his father decide for him that he'd be the villain and lived being the man he wanted to be even if that man wore a mask, just like Jackie Wells sweat bullets and was terrified before every major gig but decided living six months being a man he wanted to be was better than a lifetime being a man he hated. 2) The setting is Neo-Mideival not late stage capitalism. One thing that Marxism points out about capitalist countries is that there really isn't such a thing as a "free market" because the state is actively involved in it and it's active involvement is designed to break the competitive cycle and push a few winners in order to maximize industrial scale. Capitalist countries are marked actually by a problem of hyper cooperation not hyper competition. Market actors usually find they make more money cooperating than competing, thus anti trust laws (only applied if the public does not see the cost savings of scale.) Further all of the largest corporations and wealthiest men got there through government cooperation. What truly defines capitalism is that security is "mercenary", ie the army is a paid set of professional contractors. Therefore the entire economy is monetized. There's a fascinating period post black plague in European history where this began to happen as European leaders began trying to coerce monetary payments instead of labor obligations out of those working the land in order to pay for armies, rather than depending on armies composed of those who serve out of obligations. What makes capitalism, capitalism is this original need for a financed army and therefore the economy has to be monetized, everything has to run for profit, therefore the leaders of the society are those who operate things for profit. Capitalists. Cyberpunk is Neo-Midievalism. Security is still paid for through profits from economic activity rather than expected through obligation. However there is no figure strong enough to be centralizing. The whole of society is fragmented into thousands of competing forces who only really monetize things to try to seize territory either culturally or literally from competitors. We see the mega corps as the most obvious but there's the nomads, there's the religious leaders too! Just like lords of old had to compete with religious leaders so too do leaders in Cyberpunk's setting. In a very literal sense this is "post" capitalism. Post meaning, something new but retaining aspects of the old. In other words the Cyberpunk world has been undergoing the fragmentation that you talk being a possibility for the future. In this case it did not work out because the fragmentation meant spoiling, not competition was the primary strategy for success unlike say... the United States in the 1960s.
If you look into the background, the 4th corporate war was between Arasaka and Militech. It was truly awful but it was a corporate war. In the end both Japan and the US nationalized their respective corps to make them stop. Both screwed up and didn't clean house. They wound up legitimizing both corps and by 2077 there is no real difference between the corps and their respective national governments. The the point where the last few NUSA presidents have all been formed Militech CEOs.
You could play that campaign. As the corporations clash, they generate jobs for dummies like you. But the stakes grow higher, and the intensity of the missions too. Your street chumps might not be ready for a full war. The war spills onto the streets in growing escalation. They discussed the US federal military of 2020. It has no branches. It is organised as organic regional task forces. The average grunt is not a high-powered cyberninja, but the armed forces don't need them to be. You don't need 20.000 ED eyes to operate a cannon.
Cyberpunk v.3, their cheap-looking follow-up, and Cybergeneration, the cyberpunk kids follow-up, expanded on that. The central government is retracting and tribes and subcultures fill the gap. The corporations are also entire, disassociated cultures. People in them think "I am Maas-Biotech".
That is certainly the vibe of a lot of the post-capitalist semi-cyberpunk fiction I've read. Ad-hocracies and the like, rather than a formalized power structure. You step in when needed.
@@wesleystreet Corporate life is an entire subculture too, and it is highly regimented and hierarchal. People sit in a corp beaverville, look out at the nonsense and think they must fall in line. People are encouraged to live cradle to grave in the corporation. You can go to the corp mall, socialize at corp events. The armed forces in Twilight 2000 worked like this. Sure, you can desert from the US Army stationed in Poland by the front... But then what? You are not getting a lot more as a marauder, and now you lack even the barebones surviving logistics support of the armed forces.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism.
Fantastic video. It really helped put a lot of thoughts I had swirling around in my head into a concise, easy to understand and yet still detailed format. Subscribed!
In the Soviet Union Viktor Glushkov talked about a centralized network in the 60's named OGAS, as a part to make the URSS a efficient power with less bureaucracy and then bureaucrats, cuz that was unfinanced by the government. OGAS was a step to the socialism with and local planning but not dependant of a government, with an AI Bureau, kinda late stage of socialism.
The OGAS story is a fascinating chapter in Soviet history, not least because there was an inherent conflict between the efficiency gain of information flowing throughout the USSR and the need for the State to control the flow of information. All the funding issues and political resistance aside, their ideology and repressive system wouldn't allow for a nationwide information network to decentralize enough to achieve its stated goals. Whether those goals are achievable at all is an open question. I don't think lack of information was the core problem of the USSR's shortages, but it would have been interesting to see how they tried to use the information.
@@feralhistorian thanks for your answer, I meet your channel thanks to de algorithm. BTW I love how depth is the pop entertainment, and you review a lot of it! Thanks for your videos.
I may be a year late, but I have to stop and comment: This was a phenomenal video! You've managed to break down what, at least in my opinion, the essence of Cyberpunk 2077's critique on the dangers of unchecked capitalism and the governmental corruption that allows it. These are the lessons I believe many are either glossing over or not at all engaging with while consuming the game. Moreover, you explained the nature of capitalism, it's late stage form, and the game's grim warning of the future we're heading towards quite succinctly. You've managed to do 15 minutes what many other videos have failed (IMO) to do with runtimes that are 3 times as long. As they'd probably say in the game: Nova work, choombah! Subscribed.
Love the video. I just am kinda curious, as I remember in the ending where you run off with the nomads wouldn’t that be the post-capitalist ending? I mean I know it’s uncertain if V would live in that ending but the nomads do have there own hyper advanced tech that they plan on making contact with “in lore I think they are talking about the Technomamcers nomad or the Meta Corp” which are basically completely what you described as a decentralized network or trade and government through the Americas and the world. That’s why all existing companies and governments want to destroy the nomads despite they fact they need them in most cases. That’s my take on the nomads and the nomad ending at least.
The game does establish that V has about 6 months, so time is short and it's not really a win. I think the Nomads are really interesting as a societal cast-off, kind of like the Scraps in Demolition Man (there's a video on that coming). They're a good alternative for individuals, but not as a system. The Nomads aren't a model for a self-sufficient society, they exist on the fringes of the corporate techno-states that own most of the world and most of their equipment comes from that corporate world one way or another. Now, a story where the Nomads start to establish their own decentralized economy with production of food, manufactured goods, energy, all independent of mega-corp involvement . . . That has potential. Something like that could be system-breaking in the game world and ours.
@@feralhistorian Nomads, in the TTRPG 2020 version (though probably transporting more legitimate cargo in 2077) were the quickest way to move cargo globally. Pondsmith envisioned a "gig economy" but with neotribal mobile 'states' comprised migratory workers. Though in 2077 Panam wants to move away from selling their labour to Biotechnica, a relic of the old capitalist system, and re-embrace the gig economy and maybe looking into new ways to make a living with the corporation tech and A.I. knowledge that they've acquired...
Is it better to burn out or to fade away? Seems to be the choice for V and the fight to break out from that and the realisation that their destiny was written as soon as the Arasaka job went sideways. There's plenty of repeated graffiti in Night City of "No Future" it's a pretty hopeless place where the downtrodden seemingly have to do something pretty epic to get be remembered, which almost always extracts the toll of death, like Johnny Silverhand, or Rashe Bartmoss. Even the drinks in the Afterlife are all named after people who've died spectacularly in a mission. Jackie telling the barmaid his drink practically signs his own death warrant.
I felt so heard when you mentioned how the EIC gradually become a government apparatus before being totally subsumed by the British Government. Lots of people always bring it up alongside its Dutch counterpart as a "Company with a State" and draw comparisons to Amazon or the like. My answer to that has always been "Show Jeff how much it takes to maintain the US nuclear arsenal and around 12 aircraft carriers and see how quickly you get laughed out of the room when you propose to him to get some". Edit: I should have said "how much it takes to maintain the US Nuclear Arsenal and 12 Aircraft Carriers, whose express raison d'etre is to exist and project power and not make a single dime while being kept online. Companies love having stuff that makes them no money while being extremely expensive to maintain, it is known.
Exactly. Just some numbers - the *total* annual operating expense for Amazon (something like the 5th biggest* company in the world) is around $500 billion. The US military costs around $800 billion per year, being a small portion of the overall $6 trillion annual spending of the US Government. Jeff is welcome to take up that expense. * Interestingly, Apple is the biggest company in the world (by market capitalization), but its operating costs are around $270 billion per year.
"Companies love having stuff that makes them no money while being extremely expensive to maintain, it is known." Well, that would explain Amazon Studios...
Have you considered making a video about Children of Men? I’ve seen some more discourse about it recently and it seems to hold a lot more relevancy to people now than it did in 2006.
11:20 There is such an ending made in the Phantom Liberty DLC. Johnny is removed and V can live a long life....(SPOILERS).... ...At the cost of having V's brain damaged in such a way that they can never take on any cybernetics beyond the internal phone. V goes from a character who used the tech sold by corporations in an effort to rail against them to a person who becomes locked out of that life forever. V now has four choices on hand: 1) Become a good little consumer like everyone else in their megablock, unable to climb the socio-economic ladder with nearly the ease as they had; 2) Take up the offer from Reed and join the CIA as (presumably) little more than a paper-pusher since they can be of little use in the field; 3) Try and rejoin the merc game, albeit with a massive disadvantage when compared to their peers; and 4) bite down on the barrel of a Unity and pull the trigger. (Something tells me that MIsty's parting words to V make this choice the least likely.) In a world where even the blind mice can get cybernetic eyes V is the only one-eyed mouse in the crowd.
I was going to mention this if nobody else had. The character seems to make it out as almost a fate worse than death. Personally, I'd view it as the best ending, especially if I had done every side-job and piled up a ton of money before making that phone call. What's wrong with retiring young and living to spend your questionably-gained fortune?
I was kinda scared about what you'd say post capitalism was. But as a "self described marxist" I have to say I'd agree. Though what I'd say late stage capitalism is from a Marxian framework is the natural trajectory of capitalism towards consolidation of wealth and power. Capitalism spurs on competition, and competition has winners. Winners tend to gain advantage over losers and use that advantage to further cement their position. So late capitalism is just a vague description of what that world looks like.
I tend to agree about capitalism having a tendency toward consolidation of wealth, while noting that when capitalism is actually functioning that’s offset by competition made possible by open markets and a stable currency. But when you get a situation like we have today, where the State manipulates the currency and picks favorites in the market, it ceases to be capitalism and becomes some kind of neo-feudalism. This neo-feudalism is one possible post-capitalist system. But it’s also partially offset by decentralizing technology, making it highly unstable and requiring a lot of force to maintain. And unlike medieval peasants, todays workers can communicate across long distances and the system of control has a lot more leaks in it. And the pitchforks can poke from a lot further away. This reminds a bit of long debates with Marxists back in University. I usually agreed with the analysis of the problems, it was the proposed solutions where things got loud.
No, that is real Capitalism in the same way that North Korea is real Communism. For every Chernobyl, there is a Union Carbine. You open with Gulag, and I will raise you one Unilever. It is this that made me realize that there is no morals in economics.
Capitalism and consolidation do not go hand in hand Quite the opposite really Capitalism is an economic model and nothing more but communists(I refuse to entertain the idea that marxists, leninists, etc aren't all rough paths to communism) like to pretend that corporatism, and all the other isms are a part of it which they just arent since those regardless if anyone wants to admit it or not are political models in themselves and lack anything resembling economic structure. Think of it like saying that guns and gun laws are the same thing, one is a tool, an instrument with a very specific design and purpose while the other dictates that tool and how others may go about existing with them. The moment there is market manipulation capitalism is no longer the model as the entire point of capitalism is freedom of the market, which you cannot have if it is purposely being manipulated by outside forces(like FH has explained here)
@@victorkreig6089 "The moment there is market manipulation capitalism is no longer the model" If this were true, capitalism has never and can never exist though. There's no such thing as a market without someone, somewhere, putting their finger on the scales. And furthermore markets, due to their competitive nature, *incentivise* everyone to do so. There is no possible universe where markets are free and everyone gets a truly fair go.
Thank god! We need more of this! I am tired of seeing people only seeing capitalism and socialism as the only options. We need something else. Something more! We can all agree that both options aren't working, so which rules should we change, and how can we change them?
"both options aren't working" You don't even know what capitalism is Hint: the existence of social security excludes us from being a capitalist society
@@victorkreig6089 Taxes on private property and government regulations on every aspect of a citizen's life are what precludes our societies from being capitalist.
@@rutessian The idea that taxes on the property of capital holders and regulation of capitalism somehow prevents capitalism from existing is ridiculous. Capitalism, feudalism, communism, democratic socialism, and any other economic -ism do not exist as "either-or" states.
@@wesleystreet Do you really own something when you are forced to pay someone else to not take it from you and have to ask their permission whenever you want to change it in some way?
The Sprawl Trilogy - William Gibson's magnum opus of the genre - were such heavy reads because not only did it not have any heroes (although Count Zero's Bobby Newmark kind of comes across as one, but still; Neuromancer's Chase definitely wasn't) but its endings didn't really... slay the dragon. Or free the kingdom from an oppressive ruler. Even the results of Chase's actions in Neuromancer ended up being... for what, later on, in Count Zero? And Mona Lisa Overdrive gave us AN ending, but... then what? Shadowrun can be brighter sometimes, but that's probably because magic is part of the equation, and there are entities in its meta story beyond the original real antagonist of the genre: late-stage, digitally fueled capitalism. Pretty hard to contemplate the thesis of Marx vs the Antithesis of Smith or Rand in the context of a hyperdigital landscape when a Horror is trying to eat your soul.
The Sprawl trilogy were noir stories run through the sci-fi trope machine. Traditionally, those types of stores aren't about overturning the status quo, they're about surviving and maybe coming out better than you did on page 1.
I love how the launch / technical problems contrasted with the slick marketing and hype train surrounding the game is a microcosm it's self for capitalism .
It's more the contrast between large companies unable to build good products, but small indie developers can run rings around them and build beloved games, that's more of a microcosm of capitalism. Competition and agility promote quality, monopoly and stagnation destroy quality. Capitalism enables and rewards that competition more than any other system.
@@gregmitaindie games are not safe either. Many are also greedy (targeting children) and just deliver bad products, specifically modern mascot horror
@@KyepoNo company is "safe". If they get complacent, they become like the big companies and either stagnate or die. Then the cycle continues. The key is to keep competition alive. Something like socialism doesn't allow that in the first place, and will be doomed to stagnation or collapse from the very beginning.
@Kyepo Sure, indie game companies can make bad games (it'll be rather inhuman if no one makes mistakes), but they also make games that take risks and are far more refreshing than anything coming from bigger companies. But bigger companies do tend to have access to a much larger customer base. They compete by doing different things, which provides us with much more variety.
Really liked this video. Cyberpunk is my obsession because of the gameplay/story and what that story is saying about the state of the world. Fallout was my first obsession of video game commenting and critiquing of our world so your fallout video is gonna get played next. Thank you !
"What would a post-capitalist society look like" Star Trek, it looks like Star Trek When everyone has access to replicators that can replicate replicators, the needs for markets and currency evaporate - that is, assuming those replicators don't become exclusive to those at the top of existing/entrenched power structures
I love how the most hopeful and optimistic ending (while still quite grim and somber) is the one where V attempts to live a happy life with what little time he has left not because of the aid of a corp or the destruction of a corp, but rather in spite of what the corps and the world around him dictates
Small states like Monaco,Luxembourg or Liechtenstein function like a business. Late state capitalism is basically when corporations grow so large that they become states in all but name. The problem is not state vs business, si big vs small.
Late stage capitalism, which we are in right now, is the stage of capitalism in which the number of those who benefit from the system shrinks in comparison to those who participate in the system. The system has begun to (or already has) run out of steam when it comes to generating profit for capital holders in a form that allows the worker to participate in the system. I understand complaints about printing money and inflation but productivity has only increased, as have profit margins, while salaries have remained comparatively stagnant.
3d printing is not really going to replace factories. If you've ever used a 3d printer you should know this. It's like saying paper printers are going to replace bookstores. Technically you could print out an inter book from a pdf and bind it to a cover but your not going to.
Indeed, I'd like an actual answer to this as well. If it's the self-interest of the bully to be a bully and accumulate power over others by any means necessary, one cannot expect that self-interest will serve as an appropriate counter weight. Governments can and do act as bullies but who is that on behalf of? Is it the capital holder or the trade union? The king or the guild? The feudal lord or the serf? The pharaoh or the farmer?
@wesleystreet As long as government is accountable, it will be the fairest possible. A personal example, I was bullied at school for a while and there was nothing teachers could do about it. However, in my adult life, people at work or in my neighborhood do not bully me, and when I had students in my overhead flat throwing parties evrry week on workdays, and after seeing that cordial request did not work, a call to the police and a fine did the thing. Are kids crueler than adults, or more oblivious of consequences? Or it's just that there weren't any real consequences then, but there are now?
Who says it needs everyone's approval?? The fact that there's a single person who must be taxed or enforced against is defined apriori as involuntary; getting "bullied".
8 дней назад+1
Same way savages did. By forming war bands, seeking protection under a warlord.
So, forming governments. Only smaller ones, for now. Anarchism needs to have a system in place to avoid warlordism and feudalism. Otherwise, what's the point.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT RESTRICTS ACCESS TO WEALTH TO NORMAL CITIZENS. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT OVERTAXES THE MIDDLE LOWER CLASS!!!!! We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>ALL 1st world countries are CommunisT not capitalisT BY DEFINITION.
As someone who's been entranced by Cyberpunk since Neuromancer and Akira, I found your breakdown gave me words to say a lot of what I've been thinking. And the thoughs about post-capitalism are very... um, thought-provoking. I appreciate the nuanced conclusion and your willingness to avoid definitive answers.
Great video! Reminds me of economic and various other classes back in college. Except V did manage to kill most of the executive board of Arasaka. The nomad ending mentions that they know people that may be able to cure V.
I'd like to see more discussion where we separate the free market and ownership of capital parts of capitalism and discuss their interaction. I personally think a lot of the benefits of capitalism come from free markets and a lot of the harm from the way capital tends to accrue and the power accrual that goes along with it.
A good breakdown of capitalism (both theoretical and the thing we currently have) is needed. One of the major issues today is that we don't really have a free market when you take into account government regulation that acts as a barrier for entry into certain industries and a monetary system that directly aids the already-dominant firms.
@@feralhistorian Yes, although remembering that unregulated markets and free markets are not the same thing. It's an obvious strategy for companies of all sizes to try and eliminate competition in the markets they operate in. Regulation is a tool, too often we let companies use that tool to eliminate their competition when we should use it to stop them from doing that and ofc to prevent them doing collateral harm. The fun bit is when regulation for good gets abused for bad. I worked in computer networking for a number of years and one of the places I worked at was deliberately abusing the interoperability standards process to kneecap their competition.
I must admit I appreciate you bringing up my biggest critique in this debate. We always view it in a binary between capitalism or socialism. It's like we're stuck in the 1800s still mentally. I look forward to a point where we can fathom alternatives made available by AGI and automation, along with UBI potentially. Im not claiming what will work (or wont), I'm stating its time we start to adapt to new tech and think outside the box instead of outsourcing all our critical thinking to men whom are long gone and from a different world. Good to see this mentioned.
Laissez-faire capitalism inevitably turns into this. Corporations are designed to maximize their profits, and eventually, that reaches the logical endpoint of the corporation taking control of society. Unregulated capitalism invariably will turn into neofeudalism, hence why Arasaka CEO Saburo Arasaka is referred to as "the Emperor."
Feudalism is a decentralized system where the power of the monarch was strictly limited. There was no powerful emperor or king who could degree everything - in fact his position was reliant on that law so any attempt to change law meant harming himself. In centralized systems like absolutism, the Emperors of Europe required bureaucrats loyal to them. But companies are primarily interested in selling stuff. They are by nature self-serving and would not be loyal to a ruler or emperor unless they get monetary gain from that ( like the state being a customer ) or the state passing legislation in their favour. To link feudalism with Empire shows you don't understand feudalism, absolutism and empires in the medieval and modern sense. The latter form of empires are directly linked to centralisation of power. Historically, when companies achieved control over certain territories like a certain banana company it could only do so with the help of governments. It was not capable of reaching that point by itself. Corporations seek profit - that much we should be able to agree on. They sell you a product - whatever you can imagine for monetarty gain. If someone else offers a better product you choose that other one, or you are satifsfied and don't want to pay more than you already do. So you have a competetive relationship with different suppliers. Now your idea is that a company uses legislative power to influence the market. But ruling - governments - that COSTS money. A LOT. The only way to pay for that for an entire city or nation is to get taxes - or to leave it to the citizens. It is a process that destroys money, and does not form it. And when you pass legislation people WILL form black markets - look what happened in the Soviet Union. That should cover in a short form why your fear is completely ridiculous. The author of cyberpunk seems to be a historical illterate who doesn't understand basic historical concepts. But then again, what can you expect from a marxist who holds true to an ideology which ended in authoritarianism and has failed every single time while what he warns about has never happened?
I disagree, capitalism requires government laws and regulations to function, it requires patent laws and property rights, safe roads to transport their goods, a standard currency and a relatively stable economy. Corporations without the state collapse due to their money becoming worthless and their influence evaporating. Anarchy leads to feudalism, not capitalism, as technological progress stagnates and security becomes the number one priority, so warlords take over communities through force or promise of protection and become a new nobility.
Great video man, i really enjoyed an analysis of this that didnt just resort to talking about the evil of capitalism through a marxist historical worldview.
This is the best description of the transition from capitalism to socialism. I think I’ve ever heard, and also the best skewering of socialism… and capitalism… I must once again keep praise upon your channel. I love what you’re doing, and I hope you do it for a long time to come.
For an alternative look at "Post Big Corpo" look into the Heavy Gear setting, at the planet of Caprice. While underdeveloped, the base idea behind them is that Earth started colonies on other worlds, one of them was a Mars-like shit hole of dome living and mining. Eventually Earth consumes itself with civil war, and cuts off all the supply and support shipments to other planets, including Caprice. Being a barren hellscape that was only ever populated for mining, they are rather screwed. The only groups with the resources to save the abandoned world were the big companies (mining, dome construction, underground agro, etc) so they took over. But in doing so, the people and the corpos wrote new law that basically says you're a citizen of the corp you work for, and it is your responsibility to protect/serve/make them succeed, while at the same time the corpos primary responsibility is the welfare of their employees (not fiduciary duty to the stockholders, because they're all on earth, behind a close jump gate and massive war). It's an... interesting flavor of dystopia, and I think it could really stand to be fleshed out.
In Phantom liberty they introduce an ending where you CAN survive as yourself..sort of. If you sacrifice songbird and jonny you can live your life..but it destroys your ability to use combat cybernetics in the process. So you can live an ordinary life, but the extraordinary life of this chrome'd out death god ninja is closed to you.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted that eventually Humanity would return to a nomadic lifestyle - once we have the ability to produce sufficient energy and the necessities of survival on-the-fly. I never thought heavily about that, but I suppose he was hinting at a decentralised, post-capitalist society right there.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT RESTRICTS ACCESS TO WEALTH TO NORMAL CITIZENS. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT OVERTAXES THE MIDDLE LOWER CLASS!!!!! We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>ALL 1st world countries are CommunisT not capitalisT BY DEFINITION.
India's recent success has given me a desire to rewatch Moon, the Sam Rockwell space station isolation film. Might be a cool comparison piece for this game.
@@murunbuchstanzangurThey put a lander near the moon's Antarctic Circle. And for contrast, the Russians crashed into the moon while attempting to do the same a few days later.
I used to play the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG in the late 80s to early 90s. yah its the proto game to the Cyberpunk 2077 PC RPG. yah Cyberpunk RPGs were big in the late 80s to early 90s. and Cyberpunk 2020 RPG is one of the best, excellent easy to learn rules, rules flow was great, rules elegant. with an interesting setting. In the 2020 setting, The EEC(European economic community ) which encompasses all of Europe except for Russia is the world superpower. Japan is the 2nd economic military superpower and the USA is a dodering former superpower, having to deal with depressed economy, very high crime rates bordering on civil war. , a inept US gov. The USSR also still exists in this game, being in worse shape than the USA and with a situation bordering on civil war.
_CyberPunk 2077_ was explicitly an interpretation of _CyberPunk 2020/2022;_ CD Project Red paid for the license and even hired Mike Pondsmith. Virtually _everybody_ during the Cold War assumed the USSR would last forever, in part because nobody believed anyone capable of earning the top spot there would be stupid/idealistic enough to do what Gorbachev did. Never played _CyberPunk 2020;_ my late 80s/early 90s cyberpunk roleplaying game of choice was _Shadowrun,_ because what's better than a street samurai? A street samurai dodging fireballs and slaying dragons.
@@boobah5643 yah including me, I thought the USSR would last forever. and was surprised when it collapsed. in 1990. I also played Shadowrun 1st ed. about the same time I played Cyberpunk 2020, yah I also LOVE shadowrun, love the world. I tried playing ICEs Cyberspace, good setting, system very clunky.
Great video! I was wondering though, why would the post-feudal society you described necessarily revert to a feudal state? With their current technology could they not still build a democratic/socialist state, which could interface with the surrounding barons? I agree that there are lack of conception of the government structures that we have now would severely limit their progress, I’m just not sure if their lack of technology would be as inhibiting as that lack of knowledge.
In that scenario, they’re extremely limited in their options. They have to continue to grow enough food to feed everyone in the lands they control and without any mechanized agriculture or chemical fertilizers, the only way they can do it is through extensive cultivation of the land. They don’t have any way of increasing productivity on a given piece of land. The same applies to their manufacturing capability, it’s all at the craftsman level, making one at a time. However they choose to organize their governing structure, in practical terms they still need to spend most of their time working the land. That’s essentially why Marx and Engels expected “the Revolution” to happen in industrialized European states, they assumed capitalism was a necessary step on the way to socialism and/or communism because only by reaching capitalist levels of development would they have the necessary productive capacity to then scrape of the capitalist class and turn it all over to the workers. Russia doing it first kinda broke the mold, and they spent quite a few years racing to build up that industrial base, largely buying it from Europe and US, essentially skipping the capitalist phase. Without that industrialization phase, it’s just a question of who’s working the plow.
This was a great, nuanced discussion. One question I am left is this: Corporations, governments, and other collectivist organizations are able to marshal resources and coordinate large numbers of people. How can disorganized individuals compete with this? Wouldn't they be too weak?
It's mostly speculative at this point of course, but I think part of it would be macro-level social forces, as communities and individuals become less dependent on the goods and services corporations and governments provide, the less leverage those organizations have to compel compliance. But there's also a cultural factor. People generally default to obedience these days. To completely break out of centralized structures there would have to be a stronger tendency to question. People that can be told what to do will always be ripe for someone else to control, but people that have to be convinced are much harder to force into centralized, coercive organizations. In the end I think it's not a question of direct competition so much as building toward a critical mass of self-reliance and non-compliance leading to a shrinking of market share for big corporations and less influence of government. They never really go away, they just get relegated to the things they do well and ignored when they try to step out of their lane.
@@feralhistorian That's a good point. I'd like to add that an important part of this would be building counter institutions now that take on some of the jobs that corporations and governments are doing. Right now people are not educated to be non-compliant and self-reliant. Participation in these counter institutions would raise political awareness, facilitate networking, and serve as a school in self-reliance. Examples of these counter institutions are labor unions, financial and agricultural coops, NGOs, and so on.
This is a fantastic take. Also I really enjoy how your footage from the game actually goes with the sentences of your lecture, far too many lazy RUclipsrs don't make that amount of effort and just have generic footage playing against their essay. Big props for that. At 11:25 I do want to add that the "secret" ending (where you solo Arasaka) ends in V "winning" (sort of, while it still implies that V has 6 months to live, it also implies they may have found another means whereby to continue living/beat the Relic/escape their death sentence), however to your point V basically becomes top dog in that ending and is basically running/controlling the Solo/underworld of Night City and reaping the benefits from that (just as Rogue was). That ending doesn't go into this because the ending is left vaguely hopeful, but it's also hypocritical because to be on top of a system like this it means taking advantage of those under them, just as the corporate executives and governments did to V earlier. So the victory is basically tainted by becoming part of the 0.1% (and sure maybe V is a decent human being and shares that wealth with others in poverty situations), but the implication is a bit damning because the only way V survives/fixes the Relic situation is by becoming fabulously wealthy, powerful, and famous - which means they certainly used a lot of that wealth selfishly for themselves in order to buy up the resources needed to solve their problem. Thus V "wins" capatalism by getting on top, instead of by breaking, replacing, or destroying the system. (V can even choose to drink to themselves with a special drink at The Afterlife named after them lol - supposedly because they "died", but really it's because they're Claire's boss).
I had forgotten that the secret ending teased a slim thread of hope. I was thinking in character and figured the space-station job was about doing something legendary if you're going to die in a few months anyway.
@@feralhistorian Yeah the space station job is a sort of hail mary, last ditch effort that, if it works, is implied to save V from their inevitable death, but if it doesn't work, they'd go out in a blaze of glory (so it's still very much like nothing has really changed which is what you were doing earlier in the game before anyway). That said it's left very vague and open ended, so we can't really draw any solid conclusions from it that are really that different from the other endings.
My take on “LSC” is people tired of the powers that be provide more political power to the corporations and dictate policies that made Night City rife with shit. While you have talk with communist on CBP and many of my friends want more power to the government to do something. While I’m in the minority that it was the government’s fault giving corporations contracts and bailouts that made them powerful today. Coming from an Asian perspective. Most major corporations did not do it on their own, the Chaebols of Korea are the best examples. A number of hereditary family own companies controls a large portion of the economy all by getting that first government contract. My take would be to keep government out of the economy as they pick and choose whoever can pay the largest bribe or give contracts to family members. Love the video, keep it up!
Colorful shirt. Some of the scenes are very similar to videos of driving around Tokyo. Since 2016 I'm tired of the ongoing wrangling between capitalists and marxists, but that's not going to end any time soon I suppose.
@feralhistorian Excellent! I am a materials scientist in the energy storage field and I dream of and work towards a decentralized energy "grid" everyday. SolarPunk is my ethos.
I'm a gen z cyberpunk subgenre fan and Cyberpunk 2077 was my gateway into it. I wish I can go back in time and experience the 80s where cyberpunk subgenre was at its peak.
Having listened to this (and a couple of your other videos), I’m curious about your take on Armored Core 6, it’s true ending specifically. Seems like it’d be a fun analysis
It is refreshing seeing someone criticize capitalism and not jump to socialism as a solution. As nice and idealistic as socialism sounds on paper it doesn’t take into account human nature and the inevitability of any centralized power structure to become oppressive. Also I wouldn’t call the system of cyberpunk to be capitalism but rather corporatism. As capitalism is all about free markets which is something you can’t have when corporations control at least a majority of the market.
!['Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty' Is Utterly Tremendous [REVIEW 4K]](/img/1.gif)
This just popped up in my feed. I gotta say I love the format of this video. It felt like hearing my college professors breakdown a complex topic and using the veil of cyberpunk to explain it.
Yooo same ❤
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism. Please get educated.
So you're telling me... Monty Python and the Holy Grail gave a clearer post-capitalist option than many other media?
As usual, Monty Python is STILL ahead of its time.
lol
help, help, I'm being oppressed!
That commune is based off of a German Peasants Republic named Dirthmarschen.
I like the idea of V using the tech and their system against those who have power and control.
This is a central idea in Watch_Dogs too. Using the ctOS system against the people who helped create it and currently maintain it. “I’ll use their city against them.”
Something I would do
Go against tyrants
This is the true definition of being woke and I’m here for it, I appreciate the comparison honestly because we basically have the blueprint of what we “might” need to do eventually
Basically the character I made in Cyberpunk 2020 back in the day
It's also a central idea in 2012's "Syndicate," another eye-opening example of the consequences of unchecked and unfiltered late-stage capitalism.
there is something to that dystopian feel, even though night city is a corporate mess, we are still attracted to it. Always been interesting to me how we find comfort in these dark futuristic settings, and cyberpunk presents it really well. The game makes you feel like another nobody trying to make it to the top, and the beautiful yet uninviting nature of the city strengthens that feeling. I also like the depressive nature of all this games endings, even if you made it to the top you will die and there is no way you can stop it. When you are at the bottom you wanna make it to the top, but once you reach that point you want to go back, you can never be truly happy.
I suppose it's because you get shit on by corporations in both the real world and in fictional settings - at least in fictional dystopia universes, you get to have a laser eye
@@kuricodes_ and occasionally robespierre the shit out of their management.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism.
You're attracted to it because regardless of all of it's issues the Cyberpunk world refuses to be stagnant
Since the late 80's the entire world has been very VERY stagnant especially the US, almost coasting if you will on a loop that doesn't end. A LOT of that is by design as we long ago exhausted the marxist socialist wave we were riding on thanks to that bastard FDR from the post war, and moving past it would require both work(which politicians hate doing) and an open refutation of the economic and political horror of the past 70 years and NOBODY wants to acknowledge that since heads would literally roll if the common public were ever told they were deliberately lied to and manipulated their entire lives. Pondsmith and his friends went out of their way to bake in the reality of economics and politics into their world that we flagrantly refuse and obfuscate in our own. As a result things keep progressing and moving even when they are revisions(like the crash or the 3rd war), stagnation is not only seen as disgusting in their world but something to fear almost specifically because they dont want to end up like our world.
THAT is why basically anyone who dives in pines for it almost instantly, it eschews the disgusting stagnation we have been drowning in since the 90's and gives you a well established world to exist in that constantly reinvents itself and refuses to stand still, the ecological horrors, the sicknesses, diseases, cyberware malfunctions, mental anguish/exhaustion from the net, homicide rate, hopelessness, and backstabbing be damned because despite all that the world is still moving forward despite it's technofeudalism because you can ALWAYS change your lot. It may come with strings, it may come with severe insecurity, it may cost you many precious things, but if you want it bad enough you can still go get it and if luck is there you'll do it.
Deep down in the deepest recesses of both our genetic code and our minds we HATE standing still, (farmers are the only real example of directly defying this and even then they mostly have to trick themselves by shutting themselves off from the rest of the world) and when you are faced with something like Cyberpunk where that stagnation doesn't exist your mind screams for it
I appreciate the perspective. This was great. I always saw Cyberpunk as the extreme opposite: a 20th century Libertarian’s warning for 21st century corporatism. That being said, your points are very valid. The funny thing is libertarianism and communism can share common concerns, albeit for different reasons.
Most of my discussions of cyberpunk have been with communists, skewing my perception a bit. but yes, there's definitely a libertarian bent to a lot of it.
@@feralhistorian a few key authors have libertarian views, including Gibson and Pondsmith.
there's a lore shard in the game that alludes to night city as a libertarian hellscape. it does in some ways appear libertarian but i see it as a criticizing libertarianism as well
By libertarians do you mean pathetic right-wing weirdos who stole the term from leftist anarchists or the actual libertarians? Because the former don't have any consistent concerns at all. Their entire ideology is based on inadvertently creating a feudalist society because that is exactly what the capitalist version of libertarianism leads to and a person has to be brain-broken to think otherwise. Hoarding is at the heart of this system, and those who hoard the most will easily gain the greatest monopoly. They are just replacing the government with a few oligarchs who control everything. I can't even imagine how utterly horrible infrastructure is going to be under this system lol. Now, if we are talking about leftist anarchists, then that is a different question altogether. A much more interesting question I would say.
@@filidhdeklend893Corporatism is capitalism. Show me when capitalism worked for people and didn't involve a shit ton of unions fighting for worker's rights and pay.
Congratulations on your 1.000 subscribers man, I knew that your channel would grown since I first found you thanks to your "Drakas" videos. Now you really make a good analysis about the politics of cyberpunk, it's sad that it's seems we are going to that kind of future but without the cool cyborg augmentations. Still I'm optimistic that what ever the big "corps" are planning it's gonna fail spectacular and explode in their faces.
It often feels like I live in the cyberpunk dystopia I was promised as a child, but I thought I'd have better eyes and more gunfights.
@@feralhistoriansame. Wish we had the tech at least so I could see like normal people without glasses and thus not be legally blind anymore
We are not going in that direction, if we are we would have hit it a decade ago.
Cyberpunk is incompatible with stagnation, and our timeline is rampant with the stuff
The EIC popping up here is a surprising and interesting insight that I don't often see correlated with the economic freebooting of cyberpunk. Very thought provoking.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism. Please get educated.
What is EIC?
@@timallen5558 East India Company.
Amazingly underrated channel
To me, MR ROBOT is the most realistic "Cyberpunk" series that I ever watched.
Mr Robot isn't cyberpunk. You can't be cyberpunk without having a cyberpunk aesthetic. Not to mention, Mr Robot takes place in our day and time ... or 10 years ago (it starts in 2015).
To be fair Mr Robot is what William Gibson describe as tech triller.
The future wasn't never meant to be comunist, it's meant to be libertarian.
@@3choblast3r4 What constitute "cyberpunk aesthetics"? If you mean the conventional neon lights & rains & some alien super techs, than that would be very simplistic. It's more than that, especially the theme of urban jungle & brutalistic nature of cyberpunk looks. MR ROBOT definitely has all that & add more to the Eastern culture style to some aspects.
But the biggest spiritual aspects for me about cyberpunk is the cyber & punk aspects. In it's very nature it's the very "punk" attitudes that revolves around cyber-tech-digital world & MR ROBOT has the true essence of cyber-punk.
Also Cyberpunk don't always end up in the "future" timeline. It could be very well within our IRL timeline especially many older cyberpunk series predicted our future looks in 2020s & so on with its retro tech imaginary.
@@crozraven No, bud. Cyberpunk is indeed the neon lights, neo kitsch clothing and hyper capitalist easthetic. (often also some sort of human integration with tech, robotic limbs etc) When you remove that, you're left with sci fi. You can make sci fi with all the themes of cyberpunk but remove the aesthetic and it's not cyberpunk. You can add the aesthetic to most sci fi and make it cyberpunk'ish even without any of the themes. Cyberpunk is all about style over substance, and not in a bad way. Part of it is that 80's early 90's hollywood cool. There is very little cyberpunk and even less modern cyberpunk (altered carbon is cyberpunk, movies like Mute are cyberpunk). But Mr Robot is neither sci fi or cyberpunk. It's got a lot of brutalist architecture and stuff sure. But .. that's just real life bro. And I say this as someone that often says we're close to living in a cyberpunk world. Mr Robot is set in 2015. It's neither science fiction nor does it have the correct aesthetic. It's inspired by the aesthetic somewhat but that's because modern hacker/tech culture in general is influenced by it. The movie Hackers is more cyberpunk than Mr robot. As I said, there is little real cyberpunk. In literature the most authentic cyberpunk is probably still the sprawl trilogy (haven't read Takeshi Kotesh yet. And snow crash is garbage that makes fun of and satirizes cyberpunk). It's a style that really started with 80's hollywood sci fi movies. You can't really have cyberpunk without the sci fi element to it. Because that would basically make John Wick cyberpunk. It would make a lot of movies set in modern day Japan cyberpunk.
What we need to develop is the device that’s the opposite of a 3D Printer; the machine into which you can throw your waste and broken products and be delivered the materials that you then feed into your additive manufacturing machine to make new stuff.
Congrats on reaching 1,000 subscribers! I first discovered your channel through your Draka videos and I was one of your first 100 subscribers to boot. I love your content, man!
I remember seeing "devilspalm" come up on one of the Draka vids. There's still some things to cover with that series . . .
@@feralhistorianSpeaking of that, I recently went through the Stone Dogs on Audible and remembered an excellent part between Eric and President Hiero where they basically explain that they neither don't want to start the Final War nor end the Protracted Struggle merely because they was such a mammoth effort put into it (corporate profits, careers, whole lives, etc.) that it became a self-consuming and expanding beast. It definitely remind me of how our timeline's Cold War was fought. Probably a topic that could be covered if you are so inclined.
not gonna pretend like i understood all of it
For an easier explanation of the cyberpunk genre in relation to capitalism can be found by a RUclipsr named JustWrite in his video “ Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, and the Relevancy of Cyberpunk.”
For even more info, I recommend “Is The US Becoming A Dystopia?” By RUclipsr SecondThought
That puts you ahead of the game of most of the people that like to pretend they understand everything while being clueless.
Being curious and humble is the best kind of flex. 👍🏼
This is the best video I’ve seen on both cyberpunk and socioeconomics in a long time.
Thanks. If I succeed in making economics remotely entertaining I'll call it a win.
This video popping up in my algorithm was the best thing to happen to me this month! I’ve binged almost all your recent videos and I really hope you keep making them.
"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
I dunno, Star Trek did a lot of the heavy lifting for people. We need more media like that, hopeful and willing to not need serious conflict in every episode, because a society that works that well for everyone should be pretty damn peaceful and great to live in. Leave the real drama for the capitalists. You don't know how many times I've heard people unironically say "we need another war, people are growing soft, demanding more money while working fast food, etc."
@@nickv1212I reckon the people who say shit like "wE nEeD aNoTHeR wAR!" are the least likely to fight in it themselves.
It's the type of shit people who never served say just so they can look tough on the internet because they lost their shit when they saw a pride flag sticker on a car.
@@altechelghanforever9906May I direct you towards Theodore Roosevelt. Who was hardly alone in that in his day.
Mind, his opinion changed when, over the relatively brief period the US was involved in WWI, his sons were all killed or maimed.
It is easier to just have a free society so people who want a more socialistic system can try things their way & capitalist try things their way
@@nickv1212So since Star Trek is a prosperous socialist utopia, does that mean a thriving sci fi fictional capitalist society would prove capitalist right ?
I enjoyed this take, it was very different. I think you missed a few little details within the game itself and of the setting the game is in.
1) Most endings of the game (other than siding with Arisaka) result in Arisaka being destroyed. Not in one day and it's not obvious what's happening unless you know the context. Yorinobu Arisaka is a character the game stresses to the player spent time on the streets being a gang leader. The game asks "why?" The answer is quiet and hidden as everyone's true selves are hidden in the game. Yorinobu was told by his father what the corporation was for, what Yorinobu's life mission would be... To use Arisaka to do what the Japanese Imperial army could not.
Yorinobu refused this and refused his father's evil. He tried to take down his father with open rebellion. When that failed he feigned defeat and returned to try to take down his father's creation from within. If you pick the Corpo start of the game your boss orders a hit on members of the European Space Council to delay a vote that would have revoked Arisaka's license to have colonies on Luna. V mentions a "mole" in the very first conversation. But what did that mole reveal? The creator of the setting, Mike Pondsmith reveals on his in game radio station "Morro Rock Radio." Arisaka was building an illegal weapon of mass destruction, mass driver. Something the ESA does not allow anyone but them to have. Militech discovered this, but who let them in to discover it? Yes, Yorinobu.
The whole time Yorinobu was doing things to destroy his fathers creation. Leaking the mass drivers secrets is one of them. Selling the Relic to netwatch was another small victory. When he seizes power after act 1 you discover notes in the world indicating that he is doing all sorts of operations around Night city to agitate war with Militech. And if you finish the game without siding with Arasaka, the reveal of them stealing people's skills and souls destroys them financially... and word of war with Militech is on the wind. Yorinobu won. He never gave up fighting evil. This is the real messaging of the game, not some collectivist stuff but fighting to decide who you are. Yorinobu wouldn't have his father decide for him that he'd be the villain and lived being the man he wanted to be even if that man wore a mask, just like Jackie Wells sweat bullets and was terrified before every major gig but decided living six months being a man he wanted to be was better than a lifetime being a man he hated.
2) The setting is Neo-Mideival not late stage capitalism. One thing that Marxism points out about capitalist countries is that there really isn't such a thing as a "free market" because the state is actively involved in it and it's active involvement is designed to break the competitive cycle and push a few winners in order to maximize industrial scale. Capitalist countries are marked actually by a problem of hyper cooperation not hyper competition. Market actors usually find they make more money cooperating than competing, thus anti trust laws (only applied if the public does not see the cost savings of scale.) Further all of the largest corporations and wealthiest men got there through government cooperation. What truly defines capitalism is that security is "mercenary", ie the army is a paid set of professional contractors. Therefore the entire economy is monetized. There's a fascinating period post black plague in European history where this began to happen as European leaders began trying to coerce monetary payments instead of labor obligations out of those working the land in order to pay for armies, rather than depending on armies composed of those who serve out of obligations. What makes capitalism, capitalism is this original need for a financed army and therefore the economy has to be monetized, everything has to run for profit, therefore the leaders of the society are those who operate things for profit. Capitalists.
Cyberpunk is Neo-Midievalism. Security is still paid for through profits from economic activity rather than expected through obligation. However there is no figure strong enough to be centralizing. The whole of society is fragmented into thousands of competing forces who only really monetize things to try to seize territory either culturally or literally from competitors. We see the mega corps as the most obvious but there's the nomads, there's the religious leaders too! Just like lords of old had to compete with religious leaders so too do leaders in Cyberpunk's setting. In a very literal sense this is "post" capitalism. Post meaning, something new but retaining aspects of the old. In other words the Cyberpunk world has been undergoing the fragmentation that you talk being a possibility for the future. In this case it did not work out because the fragmentation meant spoiling, not competition was the primary strategy for success unlike say... the United States in the 1960s.
If you look into the background, the 4th corporate war was between Arasaka and Militech. It was truly awful but it was a corporate war. In the end both Japan and the US nationalized their respective corps to make them stop. Both screwed up and didn't clean house. They wound up legitimizing both corps and by 2077 there is no real difference between the corps and their respective national governments. The the point where the last few NUSA presidents have all been formed Militech CEOs.
You could play that campaign. As the corporations clash, they generate jobs for dummies like you. But the stakes grow higher, and the intensity of the missions too. Your street chumps might not be ready for a full war. The war spills onto the streets in growing escalation.
They discussed the US federal military of 2020. It has no branches. It is organised as organic regional task forces. The average grunt is not a high-powered cyberninja, but the armed forces don't need them to be. You don't need 20.000 ED eyes to operate a cannon.
Sometimes the RUclips algorithm works just right. I'm loving this content, thank you!
This felt like the political version of “engineering an empire” with Peter Weller! I could eat these videos up all day! More, just like this 🙏
I would say that cyberpunk 2077 offers the NOMAD faction as the embryo of the post-capitalist society.
Decentralized, kin-oriented, techno tribes.
Cyberpunk v.3, their cheap-looking follow-up, and Cybergeneration, the cyberpunk kids follow-up, expanded on that. The central government is retracting and tribes and subcultures fill the gap.
The corporations are also entire, disassociated cultures. People in them think "I am Maas-Biotech".
That is certainly the vibe of a lot of the post-capitalist semi-cyberpunk fiction I've read. Ad-hocracies and the like, rather than a formalized power structure. You step in when needed.
@@wesleystreet Corporate life is an entire subculture too, and it is highly regimented and hierarchal. People sit in a corp beaverville, look out at the nonsense and think they must fall in line. People are encouraged to live cradle to grave in the corporation. You can go to the corp mall, socialize at corp events.
The armed forces in Twilight 2000 worked like this. Sure, you can desert from the US Army stationed in Poland by the front... But then what? You are not getting a lot more as a marauder, and now you lack even the barebones surviving logistics support of the armed forces.
Congratulations on 1k subs man! Love your stuff. The first vid of yours I watched was the one about for all mankind
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. A true fair system would provide bailouts for all companies not just the banks oil companies and the military. We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>this is communism not capitalism.
Fantastic video. It really helped put a lot of thoughts I had swirling around in my head into a concise, easy to understand and yet still detailed format.
Subscribed!
Thanks, and respect for the A1.
In the Soviet Union Viktor Glushkov talked about a centralized network in the 60's named OGAS, as a part to make the URSS a efficient power with less bureaucracy and then bureaucrats, cuz that was unfinanced by the government.
OGAS was a step to the socialism with and local planning but not dependant of a government, with an AI Bureau, kinda late stage of socialism.
The OGAS story is a fascinating chapter in Soviet history, not least because there was an inherent conflict between the efficiency gain of information flowing throughout the USSR and the need for the State to control the flow of information. All the funding issues and political resistance aside, their ideology and repressive system wouldn't allow for a nationwide information network to decentralize enough to achieve its stated goals.
Whether those goals are achievable at all is an open question. I don't think lack of information was the core problem of the USSR's shortages, but it would have been interesting to see how they tried to use the information.
@@feralhistorian thanks for your answer, I meet your channel thanks to de algorithm.
BTW I love how depth is the pop entertainment, and you review a lot of it! Thanks for your videos.
How is this channel so small? You are an amazing speaker and the insights are of the highest tier. Thank you for your efforts.
I may be a year late, but I have to stop and comment: This was a phenomenal video! You've managed to break down what, at least in my opinion, the essence of Cyberpunk 2077's critique on the dangers of unchecked capitalism and the governmental corruption that allows it. These are the lessons I believe many are either glossing over or not at all engaging with while consuming the game.
Moreover, you explained the nature of capitalism, it's late stage form, and the game's grim warning of the future we're heading towards quite succinctly. You've managed to do 15 minutes what many other videos have failed (IMO) to do with runtimes that are 3 times as long.
As they'd probably say in the game:
Nova work, choombah!
Subscribed.
This may just be the best and most approachable overviews of socialism and late capitalism I've ever seen on RUclips. Absolutely amazing work!
Love the video. I just am kinda curious, as I remember in the ending where you run off with the nomads wouldn’t that be the post-capitalist ending? I mean I know it’s uncertain if V would live in that ending but the nomads do have there own hyper advanced tech that they plan on making contact with “in lore I think they are talking about the Technomamcers nomad or the Meta Corp” which are basically completely what you described as a decentralized network or trade and government through the Americas and the world. That’s why all existing companies and governments want to destroy the nomads despite they fact they need them in most cases. That’s my take on the nomads and the nomad ending at least.
The game does establish that V has about 6 months, so time is short and it's not really a win.
I think the Nomads are really interesting as a societal cast-off, kind of like the Scraps in Demolition Man (there's a video on that coming). They're a good alternative for individuals, but not as a system. The Nomads aren't a model for a self-sufficient society, they exist on the fringes of the corporate techno-states that own most of the world and most of their equipment comes from that corporate world one way or another.
Now, a story where the Nomads start to establish their own decentralized economy with production of food, manufactured goods, energy, all independent of mega-corp involvement . . . That has potential. Something like that could be system-breaking in the game world and ours.
@@feralhistorian Nomads, in the TTRPG 2020 version (though probably transporting more legitimate cargo in 2077) were the quickest way to move cargo globally. Pondsmith envisioned a "gig economy" but with neotribal mobile 'states' comprised migratory workers. Though in 2077 Panam wants to move away from selling their labour to Biotechnica, a relic of the old capitalist system, and re-embrace the gig economy and maybe looking into new ways to make a living with the corporation tech and A.I. knowledge that they've acquired...
Is it better to burn out or to fade away? Seems to be the choice for V and the fight to break out from that and the realisation that their destiny was written as soon as the Arasaka job went sideways.
There's plenty of repeated graffiti in Night City of "No Future" it's a pretty hopeless place where the downtrodden seemingly have to do something pretty epic to get be remembered, which almost always extracts the toll of death, like Johnny Silverhand, or Rashe Bartmoss.
Even the drinks in the Afterlife are all named after people who've died spectacularly in a mission. Jackie telling the barmaid his drink practically signs his own death warrant.
I felt so heard when you mentioned how the EIC gradually become a government apparatus before being totally subsumed by the British Government. Lots of people always bring it up alongside its Dutch counterpart as a "Company with a State" and draw comparisons to Amazon or the like.
My answer to that has always been "Show Jeff how much it takes to maintain the US nuclear arsenal and around 12 aircraft carriers and see how quickly you get laughed out of the room when you propose to him to get some".
Edit: I should have said "how much it takes to maintain the US Nuclear Arsenal and 12 Aircraft Carriers, whose express raison d'etre is to exist and project power and not make a single dime while being kept online. Companies love having stuff that makes them no money while being extremely expensive to maintain, it is known.
Exactly. Just some numbers - the *total* annual operating expense for Amazon (something like the 5th biggest* company in the world) is around $500 billion. The US military costs around $800 billion per year, being a small portion of the overall $6 trillion annual spending of the US Government. Jeff is welcome to take up that expense.
* Interestingly, Apple is the biggest company in the world (by market capitalization), but its operating costs are around $270 billion per year.
"Companies love having stuff that makes them no money while being extremely expensive to maintain, it is known."
Well, that would explain Amazon Studios...
@@gregmita That's because Apple's market value is extremely overinflated and as fake as the day is long
Have you considered making a video about Children of Men? I’ve seen some more discourse about it recently and it seems to hold a lot more relevancy to people now than it did in 2006.
That would be a good one to cover. I'll add that to the re-watch stack.
An excellent film
The book is interesting as well@@murunbuchstanzangur
11:20 There is such an ending made in the Phantom Liberty DLC. Johnny is removed and V can live a long life....(SPOILERS)....
...At the cost of having V's brain damaged in such a way that they can never take on any cybernetics beyond the internal phone. V goes from a character who used the tech sold by corporations in an effort to rail against them to a person who becomes locked out of that life forever. V now has four choices on hand: 1) Become a good little consumer like everyone else in their megablock, unable to climb the socio-economic ladder with nearly the ease as they had; 2) Take up the offer from Reed and join the CIA as (presumably) little more than a paper-pusher since they can be of little use in the field; 3) Try and rejoin the merc game, albeit with a massive disadvantage when compared to their peers; and 4) bite down on the barrel of a Unity and pull the trigger. (Something tells me that MIsty's parting words to V make this choice the least likely.)
In a world where even the blind mice can get cybernetic eyes V is the only one-eyed mouse in the crowd.
I was going to mention this if nobody else had. The character seems to make it out as almost a fate worse than death. Personally, I'd view it as the best ending, especially if I had done every side-job and piled up a ton of money before making that phone call. What's wrong with retiring young and living to spend your questionably-gained fortune?
I was kinda scared about what you'd say post capitalism was. But as a "self described marxist" I have to say I'd agree. Though what I'd say late stage capitalism is from a Marxian framework is the natural trajectory of capitalism towards consolidation of wealth and power. Capitalism spurs on competition, and competition has winners. Winners tend to gain advantage over losers and use that advantage to further cement their position. So late capitalism is just a vague description of what that world looks like.
I tend to agree about capitalism having a tendency toward consolidation of wealth, while noting that when capitalism is actually functioning that’s offset by competition made possible by open markets and a stable currency. But when you get a situation like we have today, where the State manipulates the currency and picks favorites in the market, it ceases to be capitalism and becomes some kind of neo-feudalism.
This neo-feudalism is one possible post-capitalist system. But it’s also partially offset by decentralizing technology, making it highly unstable and requiring a lot of force to maintain. And unlike medieval peasants, todays workers can communicate across long distances and the system of control has a lot more leaks in it.
And the pitchforks can poke from a lot further away.
This reminds a bit of long debates with Marxists back in University. I usually agreed with the analysis of the problems, it was the proposed solutions where things got loud.
No, that is real Capitalism in the same way that North Korea is real Communism. For every Chernobyl, there is a Union Carbine. You open with Gulag, and I will raise you one Unilever. It is this that made me realize that there is no morals in economics.
Capitalism and consolidation do not go hand in hand
Quite the opposite really
Capitalism is an economic model and nothing more but communists(I refuse to entertain the idea that marxists, leninists, etc aren't all rough paths to communism) like to pretend that corporatism, and all the other isms are a part of it which they just arent since those regardless if anyone wants to admit it or not are political models in themselves and lack anything resembling economic structure. Think of it like saying that guns and gun laws are the same thing, one is a tool, an instrument with a very specific design and purpose while the other dictates that tool and how others may go about existing with them. The moment there is market manipulation capitalism is no longer the model as the entire point of capitalism is freedom of the market, which you cannot have if it is purposely being manipulated by outside forces(like FH has explained here)
@@victorkreig6089"the moment my idea reaches its natural conclusion it stops being the same idea, vindicating me. It's perfect."
@@victorkreig6089 "The moment there is market manipulation capitalism is no longer the model"
If this were true, capitalism has never and can never exist though. There's no such thing as a market without someone, somewhere, putting their finger on the scales. And furthermore markets, due to their competitive nature, *incentivise* everyone to do so.
There is no possible universe where markets are free and everyone gets a truly fair go.
Thank god! We need more of this! I am tired of seeing people only seeing capitalism and socialism as the only options. We need something else. Something more! We can all agree that both options aren't working, so which rules should we change, and how can we change them?
"both options aren't working"
You don't even know what capitalism is
Hint: the existence of social security excludes us from being a capitalist society
@@victorkreig6089 you're off your meds
@@victorkreig6089 Taxes on private property and government regulations on every aspect of a citizen's life are what precludes our societies from being capitalist.
@@rutessian The idea that taxes on the property of capital holders and regulation of capitalism somehow prevents capitalism from existing is ridiculous. Capitalism, feudalism, communism, democratic socialism, and any other economic -ism do not exist as "either-or" states.
@@wesleystreet Do you really own something when you are forced to pay someone else to not take it from you and have to ask their permission whenever you want to change it in some way?
The Sprawl Trilogy - William Gibson's magnum opus of the genre - were such heavy reads because not only did it not have any heroes (although Count Zero's Bobby Newmark kind of comes across as one, but still; Neuromancer's Chase definitely wasn't) but its endings didn't really... slay the dragon. Or free the kingdom from an oppressive ruler.
Even the results of Chase's actions in Neuromancer ended up being... for what, later on, in Count Zero? And Mona Lisa Overdrive gave us AN ending, but... then what?
Shadowrun can be brighter sometimes, but that's probably because magic is part of the equation, and there are entities in its meta story beyond the original real antagonist of the genre: late-stage, digitally fueled capitalism.
Pretty hard to contemplate the thesis of Marx vs the Antithesis of Smith or Rand in the context of a hyperdigital landscape when a Horror is trying to eat your soul.
The Sprawl trilogy were noir stories run through the sci-fi trope machine. Traditionally, those types of stores aren't about overturning the status quo, they're about surviving and maybe coming out better than you did on page 1.
No one is ever stopping me growing turnips!
I actually really liked how this video is presented, explains complicated stuff in a simple way!
This is such a great channel. You go ...
There's a backlog of material so I'll keep going for a while at least.
RUclips just sent me this channel, and wow. Nicely done.
The glitching background is a nice touch.
I love how the launch / technical problems contrasted with the slick marketing and hype train surrounding the game is a microcosm it's self for capitalism .
It's more the contrast between large companies unable to build good products, but small indie developers can run rings around them and build beloved games, that's more of a microcosm of capitalism. Competition and agility promote quality, monopoly and stagnation destroy quality.
Capitalism enables and rewards that competition more than any other system.
@@gregmitaindie games are not safe either. Many are also greedy (targeting children) and just deliver bad products, specifically modern mascot horror
@@KyepoNo company is "safe". If they get complacent, they become like the big companies and either stagnate or die. Then the cycle continues. The key is to keep competition alive. Something like socialism doesn't allow that in the first place, and will be doomed to stagnation or collapse from the very beginning.
@@gregmita uh not exactly what I meant. Correct me if I misunderstood but I meant that there are as much bad indie games as there are bad AAA games
@Kyepo Sure, indie game companies can make bad games (it'll be rather inhuman if no one makes mistakes), but they also make games that take risks and are far more refreshing than anything coming from bigger companies. But bigger companies do tend to have access to a much larger customer base. They compete by doing different things, which provides us with much more variety.
This commentary was fantastic. I loved it bro. ❤
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Really liked this video. Cyberpunk is my obsession because of the gameplay/story and what that story is saying about the state of the world. Fallout was my first obsession of video game commenting and critiquing of our world so your fallout video is gonna get played next. Thank you !
There's more Fallout content in the works. A lot to talk about in that franchise.
"What would a post-capitalist society look like"
Star Trek, it looks like Star Trek
When everyone has access to replicators that can replicate replicators, the needs for markets and currency evaporate - that is, assuming those replicators don't become exclusive to those at the top of existing/entrenched power structures
That's the subject of today's video in fact.
But you can't get to a post-scarcity society without technological advancement. You can't get technological advancement without capitalism.
Great content as always my man
I love how the most hopeful and optimistic ending (while still quite grim and somber) is the one where V attempts to live a happy life with what little time he has left not because of the aid of a corp or the destruction of a corp, but rather in spite of what the corps and the world around him dictates
Small states like Monaco,Luxembourg or Liechtenstein function like a business. Late state capitalism is basically when corporations grow so large that they become states in all but name.
The problem is not state vs business, si big vs small.
Late stage capitalism, which we are in right now, is the stage of capitalism in which the number of those who benefit from the system shrinks in comparison to those who participate in the system. The system has begun to (or already has) run out of steam when it comes to generating profit for capital holders in a form that allows the worker to participate in the system. I understand complaints about printing money and inflation but productivity has only increased, as have profit margins, while salaries have remained comparatively stagnant.
3d printing is not really going to replace factories. If you've ever used a 3d printer you should know this. It's like saying paper printers are going to replace bookstores. Technically you could print out an inter book from a pdf and bind it to a cover but your not going to.
Government may be a bully, but it's a bully that needs everyone's approval. In a post cap world, how do you avoid actual bullies?
Indeed, I'd like an actual answer to this as well. If it's the self-interest of the bully to be a bully and accumulate power over others by any means necessary, one cannot expect that self-interest will serve as an appropriate counter weight. Governments can and do act as bullies but who is that on behalf of? Is it the capital holder or the trade union? The king or the guild? The feudal lord or the serf? The pharaoh or the farmer?
@wesleystreet As long as government is accountable, it will be the fairest possible. A personal example, I was bullied at school for a while and there was nothing teachers could do about it. However, in my adult life, people at work or in my neighborhood do not bully me, and when I had students in my overhead flat throwing parties evrry week on workdays, and after seeing that cordial request did not work, a call to the police and a fine did the thing.
Are kids crueler than adults, or more oblivious of consequences? Or it's just that there weren't any real consequences then, but there are now?
Who says it needs everyone's approval?? The fact that there's a single person who must be taxed or enforced against is defined apriori as involuntary; getting "bullied".
Same way savages did. By forming war bands, seeking protection under a warlord.
So, forming governments. Only smaller ones, for now. Anarchism needs to have a system in place to avoid warlordism and feudalism. Otherwise, what's the point.
Loved this. Thank you! East India Company as analogue is a brilliant lense!
Excellent take, glad you popped up in my recommendations
*I can listen to bro talk forever. 10/10* 🗿🔥
Thank you for the longer video.
thatsss what i needed thank you professor ( a clear distinction between 2 Completely Differently different terms and Ideologies ),
man... this was one heck of a video... you got yourself a sbuscriber.. yisus, so good. thanks for your insights
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT RESTRICTS ACCESS TO WEALTH TO NORMAL CITIZENS. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT OVERTAXES THE MIDDLE LOWER CLASS!!!!! We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>ALL 1st world countries are CommunisT not capitalisT BY DEFINITION.
As someone who's been entranced by Cyberpunk since Neuromancer and Akira, I found your breakdown gave me words to say a lot of what I've been thinking. And the thoughs about post-capitalism are very... um, thought-provoking. I appreciate the nuanced conclusion and your willingness to avoid definitive answers.
Thank you for highlighting the dual Capitalist/Marxist 'dependency on markets' as a core feature. Good stuff here - keep it up!
Great video! Reminds me of economic and various other classes back in college.
Except V did manage to kill most of the executive board of Arasaka. The nomad ending mentions that they know people that may be able to cure V.
Omni Consumer Products
You call THIS a glitch!?
Ill byy that for a dollar
I'm very disappointed.
I'd like to see more discussion where we separate the free market and ownership of capital parts of capitalism and discuss their interaction. I personally think a lot of the benefits of capitalism come from free markets and a lot of the harm from the way capital tends to accrue and the power accrual that goes along with it.
A good breakdown of capitalism (both theoretical and the thing we currently have) is needed. One of the major issues today is that we don't really have a free market when you take into account government regulation that acts as a barrier for entry into certain industries and a monetary system that directly aids the already-dominant firms.
@@feralhistorian Yes, although remembering that unregulated markets and free markets are not the same thing. It's an obvious strategy for companies of all sizes to try and eliminate competition in the markets they operate in. Regulation is a tool, too often we let companies use that tool to eliminate their competition when we should use it to stop them from doing that and ofc to prevent them doing collateral harm. The fun bit is when regulation for good gets abused for bad. I worked in computer networking for a number of years and one of the places I worked at was deliberately abusing the interoperability standards process to kneecap their competition.
The commentary and analysis is spot on, so is the history!
I must admit I appreciate you bringing up my biggest critique in this debate. We always view it in a binary between capitalism or socialism. It's like we're stuck in the 1800s still mentally. I look forward to a point where we can fathom alternatives made available by AGI and automation, along with UBI potentially. Im not claiming what will work (or wont), I'm stating its time we start to adapt to new tech and think outside the box instead of outsourcing all our critical thinking to men whom are long gone and from a different world.
Good to see this mentioned.
Muh roads!!! NICE!
Laissez-faire capitalism inevitably turns into this. Corporations are designed to maximize their profits, and eventually, that reaches the logical endpoint of the corporation taking control of society. Unregulated capitalism invariably will turn into neofeudalism, hence why Arasaka CEO Saburo Arasaka is referred to as "the Emperor."
Your dumb
Feudalism is a decentralized system where the power of the monarch was strictly limited. There was no powerful emperor or king who could degree everything - in fact his position was reliant on that law so any attempt to change law meant harming himself.
In centralized systems like absolutism, the Emperors of Europe required bureaucrats loyal to them. But companies are primarily interested in selling stuff. They are by nature self-serving and would not be loyal to a ruler or emperor unless they get monetary gain from that ( like the state being a customer ) or the state passing legislation in their favour.
To link feudalism with Empire shows you don't understand feudalism, absolutism and empires in the medieval and modern sense. The latter form of empires are directly linked to centralisation of power. Historically, when companies achieved control over certain territories like a certain banana company it could only do so with the help of governments. It was not capable of reaching that point by itself.
Corporations seek profit - that much we should be able to agree on. They sell you a product - whatever you can imagine for monetarty gain. If someone else offers a better product you choose that other one, or you are satifsfied and don't want to pay more than you already do. So you have a competetive relationship with different suppliers. Now your idea is that a company uses legislative power to influence the market.
But ruling - governments - that COSTS money. A LOT. The only way to pay for that for an entire city or nation is to get taxes - or to leave it to the citizens. It is a process that destroys money, and does not form it. And when you pass legislation people WILL form black markets - look what happened in the Soviet Union. That should cover in a short form why your fear is completely ridiculous.
The author of cyberpunk seems to be a historical illterate who doesn't understand basic historical concepts. But then again, what can you expect from a marxist who holds true to an ideology which ended in authoritarianism and has failed every single time while what he warns about has never happened?
lol; lmao even
Commies really are incapable of understanding what capitalism is, and it's hilarious
I disagree, capitalism requires government laws and regulations to function, it requires patent laws and property rights, safe roads to transport their goods, a standard currency and a relatively stable economy. Corporations without the state collapse due to their money becoming worthless and their influence evaporating. Anarchy leads to feudalism, not capitalism, as technological progress stagnates and security becomes the number one priority, so warlords take over communities through force or promise of protection and become a new nobility.
Patent and copyright laws are anticapitalistic
Great video - Vid popped in my feed after spending the last few weeks , 200+ hours, completing and beating CP2077.
Congrats on 1k!
Smartest take I’ve ever heard on this. Figures it would be from a historian.
Man someone my age being able to articulate this is a breath of greasy air ❤💪🏾💯
This was really good, keep it up!
Great video man, i really enjoyed an analysis of this that didnt just resort to talking about the evil of capitalism through a marxist historical worldview.
Amazing how relevant this is in mid-November 2024
This is the best description of the transition from capitalism to socialism. I think I’ve ever heard, and also the best skewering of socialism… and capitalism… I must once again keep praise upon your channel. I love what you’re doing, and I hope you do it for a long time to come.
For an alternative look at "Post Big Corpo" look into the Heavy Gear setting, at the planet of Caprice. While underdeveloped, the base idea behind them is that Earth started colonies on other worlds, one of them was a Mars-like shit hole of dome living and mining. Eventually Earth consumes itself with civil war, and cuts off all the supply and support shipments to other planets, including Caprice. Being a barren hellscape that was only ever populated for mining, they are rather screwed. The only groups with the resources to save the abandoned world were the big companies (mining, dome construction, underground agro, etc) so they took over. But in doing so, the people and the corpos wrote new law that basically says you're a citizen of the corp you work for, and it is your responsibility to protect/serve/make them succeed, while at the same time the corpos primary responsibility is the welfare of their employees (not fiduciary duty to the stockholders, because they're all on earth, behind a close jump gate and massive war).
It's an... interesting flavor of dystopia, and I think it could really stand to be fleshed out.
In Phantom liberty they introduce an ending where you CAN survive as yourself..sort of. If you sacrifice songbird and jonny you can live your life..but it destroys your ability to use combat cybernetics in the process. So you can live an ordinary life, but the extraordinary life of this chrome'd out death god ninja is closed to you.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted that eventually Humanity would return to a nomadic lifestyle - once we have the ability to produce sufficient energy and the necessities of survival on-the-fly. I never thought heavily about that, but I suppose he was hinting at a decentralised, post-capitalist society right there.
This was really good. A complete outlier to other pop-culture analysis which usually devolve in the exact same Marxist diatribe.
I can't believe I just found your channel. I have a backlog to catch up on
Star Trek and Cyberpunk, this channel is gold
I had never heard of the idea that the end if captialism is decentralized production. Super interesting
Best thing I’ve listened to this week. Well done.
the system this guy refers too is COMMUNISM. Communism is where all the resources are controlled by a governing body. In cyberpunk and countries like the usa, The top companies ARE BASICALLY THE GOVERNING BODY BECUZ THEY CONTROL ALL THE RESORUCES. THE CEOS who control all the countries resources are the GOVERNING BODY because the own the governmEnt through bribes, lobbying, control over laws, recieving special bailouts that allow them to fail at any time. A TRUE CAPITALISM SYSTEM DOES NOT EXIST IN THE USA OR ANY COUNTRY. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT RESTRICTS ACCESS TO WEALTH TO NORMAL CITIZENS. COMMUNISM IS THE SYSTEM THAT OVERTAXES THE MIDDLE LOWER CLASS!!!!! We are ruled by 1 large CEO class>>>ALL 1st world countries are CommunisT not capitalisT BY DEFINITION.
It's very comforting to hear a sound argument for, we don't know what a post capitalist society would look like but it will be new and interesting.
India's recent success has given me a desire to rewatch Moon, the Sam Rockwell space station isolation film. Might be a cool comparison piece for this game.
What specific success in India?
@@keanuxu5435 they put a lander on the south pole of the moon
@@murunbuchstanzangur Thanks
@@murunbuchstanzangurThey put a lander near the moon's Antarctic Circle. And for contrast, the Russians crashed into the moon while attempting to do the same a few days later.
I used to play the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG in the late 80s to early 90s. yah its the proto game to the Cyberpunk 2077 PC RPG. yah Cyberpunk RPGs were big in the late 80s to early 90s. and Cyberpunk 2020 RPG is one of the best, excellent easy to learn rules, rules flow was great, rules elegant. with an interesting setting. In the 2020 setting, The EEC(European economic community ) which encompasses all of Europe except for Russia is the world superpower. Japan is the 2nd economic military superpower and the USA is a dodering former superpower, having to deal with depressed economy, very high crime rates bordering on civil war. , a inept US gov. The USSR also still exists in this game, being in worse shape than the USA and with a situation bordering on civil war.
_CyberPunk 2077_ was explicitly an interpretation of _CyberPunk 2020/2022;_ CD Project Red paid for the license and even hired Mike Pondsmith.
Virtually _everybody_ during the Cold War assumed the USSR would last forever, in part because nobody believed anyone capable of earning the top spot there would be stupid/idealistic enough to do what Gorbachev did.
Never played _CyberPunk 2020;_ my late 80s/early 90s cyberpunk roleplaying game of choice was _Shadowrun,_ because what's better than a street samurai? A street samurai dodging fireballs and slaying dragons.
@@boobah5643 yah including me, I thought the USSR would last forever. and was surprised when it collapsed. in 1990. I also played Shadowrun 1st ed. about the same time I played Cyberpunk 2020, yah I also LOVE shadowrun, love the world. I tried playing ICEs Cyberspace, good setting, system very clunky.
@@boobah5643Shadowrun had a lot of crunch and rules. I think CP2020 lets you play faster, gnarlier firefights.
A magic system is fun though.
You can run into space Soviet in Alien too. I always imagined it as Sino-Soviet Brezjnev-in-space.
You can run into space Soviet in Alien too. I always imagined it as Sino-Soviet Brezjnev-in-space.
Great video! I was wondering though, why would the post-feudal society you described necessarily revert to a feudal state? With their current technology could they not still build a democratic/socialist state, which could interface with the surrounding barons? I agree that there are lack of conception of the government structures that we have now would severely limit their progress, I’m just not sure if their lack of technology would be as inhibiting as that lack of knowledge.
In that scenario, they’re extremely limited in their options. They have to continue to grow enough food to feed everyone in the lands they control and without any mechanized agriculture or chemical fertilizers, the only way they can do it is through extensive cultivation of the land. They don’t have any way of increasing productivity on a given piece of land. The same applies to their manufacturing capability, it’s all at the craftsman level, making one at a time. However they choose to organize their governing structure, in practical terms they still need to spend most of their time working the land.
That’s essentially why Marx and Engels expected “the Revolution” to happen in industrialized European states, they assumed capitalism was a necessary step on the way to socialism and/or communism because only by reaching capitalist levels of development would they have the necessary productive capacity to then scrape of the capitalist class and turn it all over to the workers.
Russia doing it first kinda broke the mold, and they spent quite a few years racing to build up that industrial base, largely buying it from Europe and US, essentially skipping the capitalist phase.
Without that industrialization phase, it’s just a question of who’s working the plow.
This was a great, nuanced discussion. One question I am left is this: Corporations, governments, and other collectivist organizations are able to marshal resources and coordinate large numbers of people. How can disorganized individuals compete with this? Wouldn't they be too weak?
It's mostly speculative at this point of course, but I think part of it would be macro-level social forces, as communities and individuals become less dependent on the goods and services corporations and governments provide, the less leverage those organizations have to compel compliance.
But there's also a cultural factor. People generally default to obedience these days. To completely break out of centralized structures there would have to be a stronger tendency to question. People that can be told what to do will always be ripe for someone else to control, but people that have to be convinced are much harder to force into centralized, coercive organizations.
In the end I think it's not a question of direct competition so much as building toward a critical mass of self-reliance and non-compliance leading to a shrinking of market share for big corporations and less influence of government. They never really go away, they just get relegated to the things they do well and ignored when they try to step out of their lane.
@@feralhistorian That's a good point. I'd like to add that an important part of this would be building counter institutions now that take on some of the jobs that corporations and governments are doing. Right now people are not educated to be non-compliant and self-reliant. Participation in these counter institutions would raise political awareness, facilitate networking, and serve as a school in self-reliance. Examples of these counter institutions are labor unions, financial and agricultural coops, NGOs, and so on.
This is a fantastic take. Also I really enjoy how your footage from the game actually goes with the sentences of your lecture, far too many lazy RUclipsrs don't make that amount of effort and just have generic footage playing against their essay. Big props for that.
At 11:25 I do want to add that the "secret" ending (where you solo Arasaka) ends in V "winning" (sort of, while it still implies that V has 6 months to live, it also implies they may have found another means whereby to continue living/beat the Relic/escape their death sentence), however to your point V basically becomes top dog in that ending and is basically running/controlling the Solo/underworld of Night City and reaping the benefits from that (just as Rogue was). That ending doesn't go into this because the ending is left vaguely hopeful, but it's also hypocritical because to be on top of a system like this it means taking advantage of those under them, just as the corporate executives and governments did to V earlier. So the victory is basically tainted by becoming part of the 0.1% (and sure maybe V is a decent human being and shares that wealth with others in poverty situations), but the implication is a bit damning because the only way V survives/fixes the Relic situation is by becoming fabulously wealthy, powerful, and famous - which means they certainly used a lot of that wealth selfishly for themselves in order to buy up the resources needed to solve their problem. Thus V "wins" capatalism by getting on top, instead of by breaking, replacing, or destroying the system. (V can even choose to drink to themselves with a special drink at The Afterlife named after them lol - supposedly because they "died", but really it's because they're Claire's boss).
I had forgotten that the secret ending teased a slim thread of hope. I was thinking in character and figured the space-station job was about doing something legendary if you're going to die in a few months anyway.
@@feralhistorian Yeah the space station job is a sort of hail mary, last ditch effort that, if it works, is implied to save V from their inevitable death, but if it doesn't work, they'd go out in a blaze of glory (so it's still very much like nothing has really changed which is what you were doing earlier in the game before anyway). That said it's left very vague and open ended, so we can't really draw any solid conclusions from it that are really that different from the other endings.
God like wealth and power next to crushing poverty…. Soooo UAE?
RUclips Algorithm brought me here and thanks corporate overlord computer for doing so. Great video.
Excellent and informative, thought provoking
My take on “LSC” is people tired of the powers that be provide more political power to the corporations and dictate policies that made Night City rife with shit.
While you have talk with communist on CBP and many of my friends want more power to the government to do something. While I’m in the minority that it was the government’s fault giving corporations contracts and bailouts that made them powerful today.
Coming from an Asian perspective. Most major corporations did not do it on their own, the Chaebols of Korea are the best examples. A number of hereditary family own companies controls a large portion of the economy all by getting that first government contract.
My take would be to keep government out of the economy as they pick and choose whoever can pay the largest bribe or give contracts to family members.
Love the video, keep it up!
Colorful shirt. Some of the scenes are very similar to videos of driving around Tokyo. Since 2016 I'm tired of the ongoing wrangling between capitalists and marxists, but that's not going to end any time soon I suppose.
This is first serious consideration of a post-capitalist society I have seen. Thank you.
Might you do a similar breakdown of the Solarpunk ideology?
Solarpunk has caught my interest. I'm sure it'll be discussed eventually.
@feralhistorian Excellent! I am a materials scientist in the energy storage field and I dream of and work towards a decentralized energy "grid" everyday. SolarPunk is my ethos.
You just earned a subscriber.
Its unfair to call the serf "Karl." Serfs actually labored.
Dunno if you checked out Phantom Liberty yet, but it has a ending involving what you mention around 11:25
I appreciated how he wore the ancap gang colors for this one. Represent'!
I'm a gen z cyberpunk subgenre fan and Cyberpunk 2077 was my gateway into it. I wish I can go back in time and experience the 80s where cyberpunk subgenre was at its peak.
You should give the original Deus Ex games a go and also the newer ones
@@RestlessRebel Which Deux Ex game do you recommend I start with?
@@beige_projection
Deus Ex (2000) and then Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003)
Then Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)
you still can!:D
Having listened to this (and a couple of your other videos), I’m curious about your take on Armored Core 6, it’s true ending specifically. Seems like it’d be a fun analysis
Small channel Big video keep it up!
It is refreshing seeing someone criticize capitalism and not jump to socialism as a solution. As nice and idealistic as socialism sounds on paper it doesn’t take into account human nature and the inevitability of any centralized power structure to become oppressive. Also I wouldn’t call the system of cyberpunk to be capitalism but rather corporatism. As capitalism is all about free markets which is something you can’t have when corporations control at least a majority of the market.
Gonna look at the phantom liberty DLC? NUSA is pretty interesting
I've been slowly playing through Phantom Liberty. So far there's a few points worth dissecting.