Cyberpunk pt15: The Upwardly Modular Society
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
It should come as no surprise to anyone living in a major urban centre that overcrowding is going to be a massive problem in the future. The very near future if you live in Melbourne. One of the huge issues here is that people in Western countries are simply not willing to give up their “quality of life” (read: massive mansions that are far too large for their actual needs and only serve to live out fantasies put upon most people by 1960s sitcoms, and current Hollywood dramas), and live in places that are actually of a suitable size to their needs. Everyone needs a mansion, but there’s not actually enough land for everyone to have one.
The Cyberpunk genre gives us two solutions to this quandary:
- Massively unchecked urban sprawl, leading into megacities that span multiple state boundaries, and have impressively large buildings situated in the middle, where all the work is done by an underclass of artificial humanoid life that totally doesn’t resent us like in Appleseed; or
- Arcology type structures. (more…)











I know that most of these posts on cybperunk have been concentrating on technology that already exists, and me calling out the scoffers who claim bullshit on the tech. Well, what about the societal concepts as well? Having been paying attention to the crap that’s going down both here and abroad lately, it’s beginning to make me seriously think that perhaps Ben Elton, 

