Many of its mechanisms effectively forced entire industries to require a ton more identification, record-keeping, and access by law enforcement… particularly financial and telecom companies. Or at least that’s how courts and corporate lawyers ultimately interpreted it. Potato, potato.

Though you are right that the act itself was not reauthorized in 2020. I must have missed the final vote, after its initial passage. That said, plenty of its impacts remain as they’ve been spun off into their own bits of legislation. I suppose “post-Patriot-Act America” would have been more accurate for me to say. Apologies!

Sounds like good ol’ too-good-to-be-true honeytrappery to me, but that’s pure knee-jerk speculation on my part. Army+Palantir = massive alarm bells in my book, and Proton has a growing number of issues that have tainted their reputation.

I also don’t know how it would even be possible to legally operate a privacy-centric carrier in the US given the requirements of the Patriot Act/etc. To say nothing of how deeply intertwined they all are with alphabet agencies and data brokers.

At the very least I’d use extreme caution and operate under the assumption that they’re not being 100% truthful.

They’ll fall in line, they always do. There is no bottom.

Always interested in books with trans/enby characters (well… that aren’t the tired serial killer/etc. demonization), will check those out!

I don’t so much mind if a modern writer is doing a throwback to 1980s retro-futurism so long as it’s still an intriguing story. That’s all part of my curiosity of what cyberpunk would even be nowadays. Though from other posts it seems like if my goal is to find the cyberpunk equivalent (i.e. the reaction to our current situation) something akin to “solar-punk” would be more applicable. But that’s a rabbit hole I’ll dive into later. One obsession at a time!

Glad to hear about Gibson’s later work. I had actually stared with his short story collection “Burning Chrome” but even in the forward he admits it’s basically trash and only kept around for the sake of it. I read through a few stories but got itchy for “Neuromancer”. I’ll keep pushing through… the bones (and historical significance for the genre) of it are intriguing after all, even if some of the proverbial meat is a bit off.

And my post on !cyberpunk@lemmy.zip did indeed go through at the time, but I deleted it prior to deleting the account since I wouldn’t have been able to reply (that was part of what was so busted with the piefed side of things). It was more a question about the difficulties I had with “Neuromancer” itself anyways, with the subject of contemporary writers being an aside. I’ll certainly visit in the future since I expect I’ll be in this cyberpunk hole quite awhile yet.

Heh, yeah I’m in hyper-fixation mode at the moment so it’s just mountains of magpied cyberpunk books, games, etc. for my forseeable future… or until I burnout/something shiny catches my attention.

A trans protagonist definitely has me sold, though detective-wise it depends on whether it’s just functioning as pro-cop propaganda.

Ah, that’s kind of what I gathered it would be but wasn’t sure. I may still take a gander out of curiosity, but I’ve spent too many decades playing games as it is so I’m not sure I’d get much from reading about characters doing the same inane tasks. Barring some outstanding story that just uses it more as flavor/set-dressing, that is.

Added, thanks! “Modern day dystopian sci-fi” may as well be a cyberpunk tagline at this point.

I guess I didn’t think of solar-punk as a book genre to explore. The context I’ve always seen it is very much in-life non-fiction (ala the various solar-punk communities on the threadiverse). Somehow it didn’t occur to me that there would be literature as well.

I’ll have to poke around. Thanks for the info!

“How has cyberpunk been updated for the modern era” is indeed what I’m ultimately asking about. I figured there would be a chance that the genre wasn’t everlasting and that modern takes would either ultimately be throwback fanservice, or something so wildly different that it couldn’t even be considered cyberpunk anymore… but that’s why I asked.

I had Gibson’s and Morgan’s works in my list already, though I’m definitely going to have to bump “Altered Carbon” up given your recommendation. Does Gibson’s style differ in “The Peripheral” compared to “Neuromancer” though? I’m currently reading the latter but not having the best time with his style/flow so far and am unsure if that’s just him, or the book/Sprawl series… or me, for that matter.

Oh and I had originally posted a more long-winded version of the OP in !cyberpunk@lemmy.zip but it was with my now-deleted piefed account that was just too buggy to keep using. Given how book-specific the ask was I figured here was probably a better fit.

A downed internet definitely seems like an intriguing direction to explore, added to my queue!

Currently playing through the game so probably best I wait. The titles of a few seems like spoilers may be possible, though presumably most are unrelated-but-still-in-universe stories like the animated Edgerunners show? Or are some of them actually intended (i.e. prequel supplements) to read before the game?

On the plus side: never gonna say no to more books in my list! I’m not actually sure how I missed the rest of Sterling’s work, so it’s good you brought him up.

And non-fiction is what I’m trying to escape ;P Or at least by some bizarre sadomasochistic method cope with via the fiction that everything seems far too inspired (predicted?) by.

You may very well be right, and it’d make sense if so. Some would probably consider what I’m asking for “post-cyberpunk” (or whatever), but that gets bogged down in semantics that I’m not familiar enough with to navigate.

But that’s all part of my curiosity and why the specificity of the ask. What does it even mean to write cyberpunk nowadays? If it’s a particular past vision of the future and we’re in that future (or some vaguely similar situation), then what is today’s vision? Is it even possible for it to resemble classical “cyberpunk” enough to be considered the same genre? Would it just be the same-but-more tropes? More/less grounded in existing tech? Or is it the path to creative entropy? I have no idea. And thus: the ask.

I don’t disagree, propaganda is always part of it. But use something less flimsy (if not outright contradictory when viewed in context) because this particular example loses “control of the message” with the slightest bit of scrutiny. If it’s going to be a fabrication then just use a piece of art, a rumor, or at least something vague/unverifiable rather than a single frame of an easily available video that shows the opposite of what is implied.

Perception is reality, but if you build it out of twigs then it’ll become a liability that will do more harm than good.

I’ll add the rest of Sterling’s novels to my list because hey why not (I already had a “Schismatrix” and “The Artificial Kid” on there), but most are a bit too old for the ask at hand and would be missing the (potential) influences of the last 30ish years that I’m curious about.

“The Murderbot Diaries” sounds spot-on to what I’m looking for, bonus points for being a series! Added it to my list.

I’ll check out “Dungeon Crawler Carl”, but I’m not really sure what LitRPG is. Glancing through the wiki entry it seems like I’ve got plenty of experience with RPG-but-not-LitRPG books (i.e. tabletop supplementals, actual RPG rulebooks/scenarios, in-universe-inspired, “choose your own adventure”, etc), but never LitRPG itself. Should at least be a curious stroll… I’m not usually big on aliens so we’ll see. Running Man + Hitchhiker’s Guide (the later being my all-time favorite series) has me very interested.

Because I’m curious how our current reality has influenced the genre and how major world events, societal shifts, etc. have been potentially incorporated or reimagined. So much of the classic cyberpunk concepts are based on 40+ year old pre/early-internet ideas and I’d like to see how that has changed as our society and technology has. Maybe the answer to that is “it’s niche fiction, so not at all”, but that’s why I’m curious.

As for the specificity to five: It’s a fairly arbitrary choice on my part, though I have been finding that stuff created post-covid often has a very different energy to it even if that isn’t part of the fiction itself.

Just finished Philip K Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. Enjoyed it for the most part, though some of the stuff towards the end I got lost in/annoyed by. I’ve always found Dick’s more surreal bits to be very hard to follow, though thankfully this time things stayed (mostly) grounded/sober. My bigger issue is that it ended up feeling too much like a ham-fisted faith allegory, of which I’ve had more than a lifetime’s fill of. Maybe that’s just my current state and not the common vibe or intention from it though.

I’m also stumbling around William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” but having a very hard time with it, despite being well acclimated to the cyberpunk tropes it popularized. Something about Gibson’s style/flow just isn’t clicking and I find myself completely lost in what the point of anything he’s describing is, only sometimes realizing in retrospect. Perhaps most unexpectedly it’s not the cyberspace interpretation (or jargon, etc) that throws me either. The whole thing just feels very disjointed.

Finally, and seemingly perpetually, I’m picking my way through my battered copy of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” that I’ve trucked around for the past 25 years. Not necessarily a fun read, but nonetheless a fascinating puzzlebox of literary art that my brain is the perfect/worst fit for. I’m very glad I don’t smoke anymore because the paranoia this journey would cause would obliterate what few bits of me remain.