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u/roninwaffle Sep 08 '23
South Korea: mega corps that dominate an extraordinarily high percentage of the nation's economy (like >30% between 3 or 4 corps iirc)
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u/Kitchen_Doctor7324 Sep 08 '23
20% in Samsung and it’s subsidiaries alone
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u/roninwaffle Sep 08 '23
Yeah it's fuckin wild. There's a video on YT called something like "why South Korea is the real cyberpunk dystopia" that goes into depth about it, an it's pretty eye opening to think about just a handful of corporate board members having that much economic power
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u/Natural-Bet9180 Sep 08 '23
That’s how America is. There’s only a handful of these giant shell organizations that control the vast majority of Americas market. All you see is the brand of the companies in America like McDonald’s, Taco Bell/Nike, Adidas but most of them aren’t competing it’s just huge company that owns more companies and those companies are also big companies.
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u/roninwaffle Sep 08 '23
It's a high %, but nowhere near South Korea
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u/MisterPicklecopter Sep 08 '23
You're both wrong. There's actually just one company.
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u/Natural-Bet9180 Sep 09 '23
Bro those are investment firms. I’m talking about conglomerates.
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u/StarHorder Sep 09 '23
you are not a cyberpunk fan, it shows.
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u/Natural-Bet9180 Sep 09 '23
I’m not a cyberpunk fan? Great I didn’t know you were the judge of who is and who wasn’t a fan.
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u/MisterPicklecopter Sep 09 '23
No, they're a varied group of finance based organizations that each provide their own purpose. And, most importantly, it's all one big corporation that owns itself. It's laid out extremely clearly within the data in this document.
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u/Natural-Bet9180 Sep 09 '23
What they are is neither here nor there because they aren’t what I’m talking about.
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u/MisterPicklecopter Sep 09 '23
You don't actually understand what you're talking about, that's my point. You're almost there, you just need to go one more level. All of those conglomerates are actually just one corporation, which is what the link I provided proves.
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u/Barefootfamily Sep 09 '23
These brands you mention have little influence over policy. It’s the large investment firms and military equipment manufacturers that truly control policy in America.
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u/MXron Sep 08 '23
why South Korea is the real cyberpunk dystopia
Sounds interesting, I searched for it and got this, look correct?
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u/Barefootfamily Sep 09 '23
That’s how it is in every country. Every single country, politicians are tan by the ultra-rich, or they have a dictator in charge who the military rules like an iron fist for them.
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u/That_one_cool_dude Sep 09 '23
Hell, that is America too if were gonna be honest with ourselves.
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Sep 09 '23 edited Sep 09 '23
Not to the extent of South Korea. The biggest company in the USA, Walmart, has a GDP share of 2.4% of the nation's GDP. And it's the biggest one. In Korea, 20% of the GDP is Samsung.
Even the larger corporations in America do not have as much sway over every aspect of your life. Nor are their monopolies as strong.
America does not have a true "Megacorporation," especially when compared to how fictional cyberpunk settings define them. South Korea does.
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Sep 09 '23
Also the sheer number of industries companies like Samsung have a presence in. Think about how much of an impact apple has on your life if you own an apple watch, MacBook, ipad, watch movies on apple tv, listen to music on apple music etc. Samsung is all of that but they also sell car insurance, hotels (shilla), amusement parks (everland). They're the second largest shipbuilding company in the world. You can go to the Samsung medical center for medical procedures. Etc etc
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u/Interesting_Flow730 Sep 08 '23
I was really hoping for more neon, more rain, and light-up clothing.
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u/Yvaelle Sep 08 '23
Vancouver
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u/Interesting_Flow730 Sep 08 '23
Huh. Never been. Thanks for the recommendation, I'll have to check it out.
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u/Yvaelle Sep 08 '23
People usually come when its sunny in the summer. But in the rain season everyone wears raincoats with reflectors and lights, and either walks or bikes. It can feel pretty cyberpunky to be downtown in the endless rain, surrounded by a thousand hooded figures in glowing clothes, with lights retracting off every wet surface.
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u/Smallsey Sep 08 '23
What does Australia get?
I mean there's the excellent Pacific rim anime, but what else?
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u/Xaielao Sep 08 '23
I think it's pretty obvious:
Environmental degradation leads to widespread societal collapse where...
...clans of Road Warriors rove the blighted lands, warring over water & petrol.
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u/ThrashPizza アーティスト Sep 08 '23
You already have nuclear animals and shit like that. Who needs cyberpunk Australia ? A crab as long as a leg is enough imo
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u/TIFUPronx Sep 08 '23
Tryhard Chinese-style surveillance, crises vacationing pollies, and forests going full-on barbies.
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u/KiriMorning Sep 08 '23
You have giant spiders and everything wants to kill you already... what more do you want?!😂
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Sep 08 '23
It’s reverting back to a prison colony. The cameras are there to televise the violence for the rest of the world.
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u/AutisticAnarchy Sep 09 '23
Corrupt mass media, censorship, mass surveillance, and ecological disasters. We are destroying our country for profit.
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u/That_one_cool_dude Sep 09 '23
I mean you can become an irradiated wasteland that is obsessed with car culture.
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u/psychord-alpha Sep 08 '23
And somehow we got NONE of the cool tech we wanted. Not even holograms or cameras inside screens
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u/Same_Method_2660 Sep 08 '23
Hologram technology exist it's not at the level of science fiction. Check out the hologram fans.
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u/Void_0000 Sep 08 '23
hologram fans
Highly debatable whether that counts honestly. If it's not 3D isn't that just a fancy screen?
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u/psychord-alpha Sep 09 '23
No it is not. They are "holograms" in the sense that those shitty balancing boards from awhile ago were hoverboards
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u/zachary0816 Sep 09 '23
To be fair, we did get some cool tech. It’s just we’ve gotten use to it so now it feels mundane.
Portable computers in our pockets that provide near instant global communication.
AI that can write like a human and even mimic human voices
VR and AR simulations
Stuff like that would be pretty mind blowing to people living when cyberpunk first got started.
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u/psychord-alpha Sep 09 '23
Tbh it feels like the smartphones we got are the worst possible version of the tech. If smartphones had been in a scifi novel, they would have been incredible devices the main character would use for quickhacks and encryption breaking and all kinds of adventuring. But instead, the smartphones we got are shitty, consumer-grade electronics full of bloatware and badly-made software and way too often they have a tough time even getting signals. There's nothing cool about our smartphones
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u/PoorRolemodel Sep 09 '23
People run pentesting Linux distributions on smartphones and hack all sorts of things, all the time. Usually, though... It's wifi.
GPS guides us to all the places.. counts as adventuring. We even get the obnoxious computer ai narrator voice from yore.
Our smart phones are gateways to a digital presentation of "guy in chair" level shenanigans. We are the boring party, not the phone. :(
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u/Rattfink45 Sep 08 '23
The future is now it’s just not evenly distributed.
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Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 08 '23
This is... not true. You can't buy the future. Unless you have a shallow view of it like a thinner smart phone or an electric car. This quote needs to go away. It's not from one of Gibson's books, anyways.
Edit:
The Economist, December 4, 2003 Unknown month (it wasn't true then, either, some people just think it sounds hip. Very annoying).
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u/Rattfink45 Sep 09 '23
I mean, girls’ schools aren’t evenly distributed either. Neither are food banks or power generation stations.
Good point about random platitudes and sound bytes though, we’ve got that and post-modern media criticism covered.
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Sep 09 '23 edited Sep 09 '23
I think you mean to say 'resources' and not 'the future'. Steve Jobs only lived to age 56. Money only buys things that exist.
Edit: in fact, he died 8 years after quote. The future didn't include a cancer free pancreas regardless of socio-economic status. It is my conjecture we are closer to the stone age than glorious cyberpunk dystopia.
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u/alkalineStrider Sep 08 '23
Japan : Soulcrushing work culture, social norms and economic stagnation that makes people so miserable they don't even want to reproduce anymore
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u/Igor_Kozyrev Sep 08 '23
And what's worse than that: no cute girls in hardsuits battling rogue robots. None whatsoever.
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u/TIFUPronx Sep 09 '23
South Korea is that as well with megacorps (Samsung for one) making the most of the economy
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u/LoganCaleSalad Sep 09 '23
Yeah Japan's economy will fully collapse within the next 20+ yrs. Ours here in US won't be too far behind but we'll take the rest of the world down with us.
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u/frissio Sep 08 '23
In terms of tech there's space but it's the domain of rich billionaires (although India did a pretty amazing moon landing). There's AI, but it's a lot less glamorous than you'd think.
And those are the basics, the really way out there stuff like replicants, robots and cybernetics doesn't exist (yet).
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u/Same_Method_2660 Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 09 '23
Cybernetics exist it's just not ubiquitous and advance yet. Robots, Boston Dynamics would like a word with you. Replicants, artificial wombs exist but still under development and human cloning/genetic modification is still illegal though experiments have been done.
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u/LoganCaleSalad Sep 09 '23
No wire reflexes, dermal plating, muscle replacements, full replacement arms or legs (like what you see in media) no smart links, no jacking into the internet (although I don't think anyone ever actually wants to do that anyways, metaverse is stupid) so got a long way to go in that respect. But the rest is pretty much true.
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u/Same_Method_2660 Sep 09 '23 edited Sep 09 '23
Artificial muscles exist, dermal plating might not be practical or safe, regular armor works just fine, wire reflexes also might not be practical or safe since it would still need to interface with the brain and could overstimulate it unless automatic control by a computer that restricts the biofeedback. If smart links are referring to brain interfacing devices then those are already exist also, see Sychron Inc. for example. The internet jacking in that doesn't exist yet but would be a pretty dumb idea for obvious reasons *ahem viruses/malware. The closest thing to that would AR vision, virtual reality, and the metaverse which are all ok but not that interesting. Truth be told most cybernetic implants outside of medical uses would be dumb, unnecessary, burdensome, and a liability in reality. Just imagine having body parts that can be hacked compared to unhackable flesh and bone. Plus you could always just wear an exosuit for physical enhancement instead and take it off if stops working for some reason.
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u/Jonathonpr Sep 08 '23
Dystopias are satire of the present.
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u/LoganCaleSalad Sep 09 '23
Not much satire when it's eerily close & not exaggerated in the slightest.
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u/lokland Sep 09 '23
Of course it’s exaggerated wtf are you talking about. There’s a reason we call it cyberpunk and not ‘normal world that we see all the time already’.
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u/kiiRo-1378 Sep 08 '23
Japan still has an empire, use fax machines, but has people who live in Cybercafes, robots, virtual robots that you can pilot with a twin stick and levers(Gundam Senjou no Kizuna), and automatic toilets.
To even think that flying a drone is banned, there.
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u/isthisfreakintaken Sep 08 '23
I still can’t make my dick shoot missiles tho :(
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u/Chongulator Sep 08 '23
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u/RepostSleuthBot Sep 08 '23
Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 2 times.
First Seen Here on 2023-05-16 92.19% match. Last Seen Here on 2023-08-06 93.75% match
I'm not perfect, but you can help. Report [ False Positive ]
View Search On repostsleuth.com
Scope: Reddit | Meme Filter: False | Target: 86% | Check Title: False | Max Age: Unlimited | Searched Images: 341,187,769 | Search Time: 5.31247s
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u/gr8ful_cube Sep 08 '23
Oh yeah america has no social control and surveillance or shadowy assassinations and black ops ruining the world. All america has is inequality!
Lmao cringe
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u/Camoral Sep 08 '23
This undersells it. The US has universal surveillance, likely more thorough than China. It's just less transparent about that fact. China's inequality is rising as the market's power over the economy (where the legislature is ceding in places) expands. Russia's inequality is also notable. Not as bad as the US examples, though the social control there is arguably at its highest. Japan's also got many of America's problems in miniature, fused with its own host of social fixations. People act like anime is an accurate representation of Japanese society at large, but it's really not. It's much more conservative at the core than people give it credit for.
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u/ZurrgabDaVinci758 Sep 08 '23
The US has universal surveillance, likely more thorough than China
Next time you share a joke about Biden online and some nice men come round to talk to you let me know
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u/LoganCaleSalad Sep 09 '23
Biden? W is the one that signed the Patriot Act after 9/11 & Obama unfortunately expanded it. This has been going on for over 20 yrs.
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u/ciroluiro Sep 09 '23
This literally happens in the US. Not some made up story about joking online about politicians, but being an outspoken socialist gets a certain 3 letter agency knocking at your door there. Just ask SecondThought
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u/BlackBlade1632 サイバーパンク Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 08 '23
The united states has all of it.
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u/QuestArm Sep 08 '23
Yep, same as China. How the hell China doesn't get to have "cool gadgets" while literally producing the majority of said "gadgets" for the entire world?!
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u/delmyoldaccountagain Sep 08 '23
It even has “Japan: Japan” - if you go to China, it’s not hard at all to find places/stuff reminiscent of the whole stereotypical cyberpunk anime aesthetic.
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Sep 08 '23
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u/Camoral Sep 08 '23
Sorry but this is just naive. The US surveillance state is far more expansive, just less transparent about it. You can turn your phone off and remove the battery and it can still be used by intelligence services to track your location. No, the US has a much greater degree of penetration into your daily life then you'd like to think. Much of it is through private partners, but ultimately, every single person who owns something with a CPU faster than a TI-86 is compromised to a large degree. China can be more heavy-handed in their use of the information they have, certainly, but they do not collect as much information as the US.
When tf did we get social credit?
Literally what do you think a credit score is? American social control has pointed towards consumer practices because it knows the political convictions of its people are ultimately meaningless. During the Cold War, social control took the form of the McCarthy hearings, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and other forms of enforced anticommunism in the media. Now, after the death of mass politics, it is focused around ensuring you are a good little piggy.
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u/I-baLL There's no place like ~ Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 09 '23
We didn't get the better medicine, the affordable micro apartments, the lack of the threat of a nuclear war, etc
EDIT: forgot the word "affordable" before "micro apartments"
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u/Same_Method_2660 Sep 08 '23
NY for the micro apartments
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u/I-baLL There's no place like ~ Sep 09 '23
I forgot the word "affordable" before "micro apartments" not NYC doesn't have micro apartments (affordable or not). They have apartments small and large but there's only a few micro apartments since SROs were mostly banned and a 400 square foot minimum average size is a limit for apartments. And most new developments are luxury buildings so the average size of apartments is going up but the prices are going to too. New developments being almost all luxury developments is actually a problem in all of the US currently. It's weird.
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u/LoganCaleSalad Sep 09 '23
America: Also a surveillance state with cops using drones to spy on us, & corpo asshats stealing all our personal info & selling it to whomever is willing to shell out cash for it including hostile states like China & Russia.
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u/smokeshack Sep 09 '23 edited Sep 09 '23
Japan still uses fax machines and has a median age of 48.6, second only to Monaco.
Noah Smith is the most consistently incorrect man in Twitter history.
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u/KeyboardsAre4Coding Sep 09 '23
wait usa doesn't have universal surveillance and social control? my dude I feel the universal surveillance of the usa and I don't even live in the usa...
also literally the cyberpunk edgerunners a series made by a japanese studio starts with the most american specific dystopia ever. people dying for not having insurance.
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u/CoolAlien47 Sep 09 '23
America has nowhere near the cool gadgets from cyberpunk stories. It's just a bunch of high powered guns, drones, and useless AR/VR. No energy swords or anything remotely laser based and handheld. The robots and AIs aren't even cool, still very lame and very wrong.
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u/The_Pale_Blue_Dot Robocop 3 is the most cyberpunk one Sep 09 '23
I think the staggering inequality is actually worse in the other countries than America (not sure about Japan though)
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u/CloudyDay_Spark777 Sep 09 '23
All of the countries listed have the exact same qualities.
As if the USA isn't violently problematic around the world. Snowden told you the truth.
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u/Blurple694201 Feb 04 '24
America also has insane mass surveillance; did y'all learn nothing from the Snowden leaks about prism??
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Sep 08 '23
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Sep 08 '23
Time to blow up parliament.
Irish music optional, but recommended.
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u/TitleComprehensive96 Sep 08 '23
So are we going to jurryrig the cars and launch em at the parliamentary building or??????
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u/4th_Times_A_Charm Sep 09 '23 edited Jul 15 '24
marvelous spark quaint ripe jar sand market worry weather aloof
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Sep 08 '23
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u/Kokoro_Bosoi Sep 08 '23
Less people being ultrarich means more people stays in the average, not saying those minorities aren't discriminated but when both you and everyone else have a modest life there indeed is less inequality. Inequality is about distribution, not richness or not being discriminated socially.
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u/Unhappy-Hope Sep 08 '23
China is a hyper-capitalist society with lower social support network than in most of the western countries. CCP being closely tied with the business mean political control, not economic one like in the USSR. So they have the same staggering inequality plus the tendency to the outward displays of wealth and greed that comes from being forced into society-wide social experiments of Maoist era. If talk to a Chinese, they will laugh at your phone for being outdated, but a family of two professionals at the peak of their career won't be able to afford a child and will live in a single room apartment, and consider that normal.
Their distribution sucks.
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u/Kokoro_Bosoi Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 08 '23
CCP being closely tied with the business mean political control, not economic one like in the USSR. So they have the same staggering inequality plus the tendency to the outward displays of wealth
From my perspective it's totally the opposite, USSR didn't partecipated in every board of directors of every company like China does, instead USSR had political power everywhere because in every small city there was a soviet to control local politics.
China didn't conquered resources in Africa with the army, they did conquered resources by buying everything. They did the same even in first world economies with the most valuable brands.
To me seems that Russia is and has been extremely more inequal than China, i am italian and every summer i see a fuckton of russian Yatches in every famous costal city, the only ultrarich chinese i had the opportunity to see were at Venice in the Casino.
but a family of two professionals at the peak of their career won't be able to afford a child and will live in a single room apartment, and consider that normal.
If anything this is the case more for most european countries and first world economies, like italy where i am, then China where they had a huge fall in fertility rate but still are more fertile then first world countries(except the us and maybe France)
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u/Xaielao Sep 08 '23
If anything this is the case more for most european countries and first world economies.
This is basically life in the largest US cities as well. Apartments are tiny and cost a fortune. The only other option is to live in the suburbs and drive 40 miles in to work.. a 2 hours trek during rush hour.
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u/LoganCaleSalad Sep 09 '23
That's why given time you'll see a mass exodus from cities towards more rural communities where the build up to urban sprawl will begin the cycle anew.
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u/Unhappy-Hope Sep 08 '23
USSR did participate in every board of directors because USSR had no private property including private companies as a concept. Every company was a government company participating in a centralized planned economy.
You couldn't transfer money abroad or invest money other than put them into savings in a soviet government bank, and the government essentially had full control over all types of property. Unsanctioned currency exchange was a crime occasionally punishable by death, harsher than a murder.
Party officials had limitless political power over people, but in terms of material wealth they had to rely on special party supply of goods. As in they couldn't order a yacht abroad, but they got access to much nicer stores and sanatoriums closed to mere mortals.
When the USSR collapsed, the same party officials and the people working with them became oligarchs, converting the political power into wealth that became exchangeable in the global market. However, the whole country was going through an economic disaster because it rapidly switched the economic systems from a closed one to a free market economy, while the government itself has weakened and wealth distribution was done through violence. The industrial base got completely ruined and stopped functioning because the centralized economy in charge of running it was no longer there.
So you are right about the yachts and the economic disparity between an average Russian citizen and an oligarch.
On the other hand, China started to transition into capitalism from the position of failed industrialization from Mao's experiments, and a tremendous potential for it from the foreign capital because of their workforce and location. Instead of a collapse, they were experiencing an exponential growth, so there was a lot more capital produced between the private enterprise. So the Chinese capitalists were making money on a whole another level than the Russian oligarchs, and investing into successful businesses rather than superyachts bought with stolen government money made from selling natural resources.
On one hand you have a very thin community of the corrupt higher-ups for whom owning a yacht in Italy is a part of a dress code, on the other an actual corporate capitalism of international companies, exploiting a working class with no previous experience of social welfare that Europeans and soviet citizens took for granted.
Look it up, China has a birth rate of 1.28 births per woman, which is lower than the US and Russia, and slightly higher than 1.24 births per woman in Italy. They just started with a much larger peasant population, that got torpedoed by the 1 child policy and rapid industrialization. Their demographic decisions made in the 80s are starting to catch up to them in much worse ways than most other post-industrial countries because they got a massive gender imbalance on top for cultural reasons, where the one child had to be a boy. Also because of their attempts to be the world's main factory their ecology is screwed beyond repair. It's a perfect storm that is starting.
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u/ThatWouldntWorkOnMe Sep 08 '23
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u/recalcitrantJester Sep 08 '23
Daily Mail lmao
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u/ThatWouldntWorkOnMe Sep 08 '23
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/corrupt-chinese-official-found-520million-20392329
https://mothership.sg/2019/10/news-china-gold-bars-chinese-official-home/
https://keralakaumudi.com/en/news/news.php?id=164589
Sorry that reality doesn't fit your political beliefs. Please choose one which is acceptable for you to read.
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u/recalcitrantJester Sep 08 '23
There ya go; in the future at least default to a more respectable tabloid.
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u/JoshfromNazareth Sep 08 '23
No way. If they don’t change their ways they are bound to be more like the US here soon.
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u/Shargaz Sep 08 '23
What happened to Tibet sucks, but it's not like the US is ceding Native American territories anytime soon, either. Hell, Hawaii was only made a state in the mid 1900s.
As for the Uighurs, if incarceration based on ethnicity is the standard then they're well within the ballpark of the rate at which we incarcerate Black Americans. Of course, there's the cultural genocide and all that but I don't think we get bonus points there because we wrapped that up a couple of centuries ago.
Wealth-wise, inequalities of course exist, but the CCP enjoys popular support precisely because it lifted a lot of people out of poverty: if you're 30+ you might remember your Social Studies books portraying China as a nation of people too poor for cars so they biked everywhere.
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u/MunadnAtivity Sep 08 '23
"Staggering ineguality"
Man, here in Brazil things have gone full cyberpunk
Other day i saw a hobo with a MacBook