Invisible Cyberpunks

I was had an old Big Joel video about scambaiting on as background listening while doing my little daily puzzles and had some idle thoughts on the way people talk about the world we live in as a cyberpunk dystopia but boring or stupid or uncool or other such descriptors. The awful world is there but not the spirit of fighting against it. We have the corpos but not the punks.

And I think one thing in cyberpunk works is the class stratification, the corpos and the punks, are very geographically localised. Class stratification is present and highly visible, the rich gorging themselves in their towers and the poor living on the scraps below. Obviously there is class stratification in western cities but there is of course a larger stratification between the global north and south. The manufacturing and menial service jobs that can be done remotely outsourced to places with lower pay and fewer labour rights. The most marginalised are on the other side of the world.

This video in particular is talking about Indian call centres and Indian scammers and, returning to our boring cyberpunk dystopia, a lot of the people hacking other people’s brains, the people flooding Facebook with AI slop chasing trending keyword and engagements are largely people in India and other developing countries who have familiarity with tech doing those devalued jobs who are able to eek out some meaningful amount of money through exploiting Facebooking algorithms and ad revenue. It was the same with “fake news” before that term got hijacked to mean deliberate political misinformation. That originally comes from an ecosystem of people creating outrageous false clickbait aimed at an American audience without actual care for political aims, just syphoning off the pennies they could get from ads on emotionally charged headlines in a strategy that was only later merged with deliberate misinformation networks.

I am not trying to say these things are noble, but they are interesting and often invisible to people because we have already structured society to hide those people and that labour off beyond the horizon and we only really see the parts that are reflected back into the western cultural consciousness. People see shrimp Jesus and think about the evangelical Christians on Facebook who it is targetting and not the tech support worker in the Philippines who is actually producing it.