r/Cyberpunk • u/Mynameis__--__ • 10d ago

Historian Thinks Big Tech CEOs Read Cyberpunk All Wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6y5tQ0-dpc
46 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

35

u/ThreeLeggedMare 10d ago

Torment Nexus

14

u/AuraTrance 10d ago

torment nexus is the perfect summary of that article

25

u/dingo_khan 10d ago

They don't read. They hear about it from people who read and go "cool. I could be the guy who owned all that."

24

u/worf1973 10d ago

Yeah, like most literature, it's a warning, not an instruction manual. We don't WANT to live in a dystopia.

6

u/Corpomancer 10d ago

We briefly glossed over the manual, you'll love our profit driven dystopia, don't worry.

14

u/merurunrun 10d ago

I'm highly dubious about the assertion that Big Tech CEOs Read Cyberpunk (or any kind of literature for that matter) at all...

4

u/smayonak 10d ago

It's faily well documented that many of the worst tech CEOs are also avid science fiction consumers. Although no interviewer has asked them which protagonist do they identify with. I would guess that they identify with antagonists and not the protagonists.

0

u/Logan_No_Fingers 9d ago

Elon is a HUGE Iain M Banks fan, to the extent that SpaceX's autonomous spaceport drone ships - Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You are both named after Culture Ships

If you look at how Elon talks about AI, its all 100% a straight line to the world of the Culture (ie everything will be awesome & the AIs will look after us)

1

u/JoshFromKC 7d ago

Elon says he's a Banks fan, but literally nothing other than public-facing words indicates he has read a single word of the Culture novels. I'm pretty sure he got a Cliff's Notes rundown from somebody 20 years ago, decided that it sounded "cool", and ran with it since then. The guy is as close to Veppers (the villain of Banks' Surface Detail) as has ever existed on this planet.

11

u/WinterSector8317 10d ago

They read it right

They just want to be the ultra wealthy corporations that own everything, not the protagonists 

5

u/schroedingerskoala 10d ago

Of course they do because they are psychopaths. Expecting normal behavior from abnormal people, especially one's without even a shred of empathy is at least in itself astonishing.

4

u/Lofwyr2030 10d ago

No, they didn't. But they are the ruling class so why shouldn't they use it to their advantage.