chapotraphouse

low-tech cyberpunk dystopia

i've been thinking about this for a while so i'm going to expound a bit down here in the comment section of this shit-post in order to minimize engagement.

labor theory of value predicts this. the future is still going to be based on human labor, that's why technology isn't a panacea the way it gets depicted in liberal science fiction. the "ai revolution" is entirely about trying to minimize wages and extract more surplus value from labor, not about replacing human labor. no amount of obfuscation will change the fact that it's all a series of mechanical turks of rube goldberg complexity.

"technology" isn't a line on a chart , it's intimately related to productive capacity.

if time travelers kidnapped a few thousand scientists, engineers, and so forth from the present and took them back thousands of years and dropped them naked in the post-glacial northern european steppes, the children and grandchildren of the very few who survived would quickly reinvent cave painting as the single best means of improving their productive capacity in the material conditions they find themselves. they certainly aren't building a chip manufacturing plant to start making computers.

so the cyberpunk dystopia we're entering is necessarily going to have a lot of these "low-tech" elements as people struggle to survive with what's available to them. the distribution of production will be unequal around the globe, so there will also be high-tech elements in perhaps surprising ways. in 2087 perhaps some enterprising individual will install some off-the-shelf guidance and telemetry systems onto a catamaran hull, load it up with burkinabe solar panels, and program it to sail a shipment of this precious commodity to clients across the sea. there's a small chance that usian pirate drone patrols will notice it, of course, but the rumor on whatever social media exists in 2087 is that lately they've had their hands full with... you get the idea.

the apparent contrast of "low-tech" and "high-tech" is only going to feel like a contradiction to people (like me) who have internalized liberal economic theory based on the notion that value is ultimately created by the very smartest of fail-children having the very best ideas.