Cyberpunk ideas

[Strangebuddy]

A game came out today which got me interested in pitching a few cyberpunk ideas. As always, I want to hear your own spins and would love to see lots and lots of ideas, despite it being a niche genre.

1. Porn has changed dramatically. It's no longer just an audiovisual experience. For the right amount of money you can download a full session with all of the smells tastes and texture going into your mind. While the romantics might use it to relive their wedding nights, it also means porn stars are more popular than ever as they can give a performance that will leave the user breathless.

1a. A woman does porn for a while and then leaves after she makes enough money to go back to school. Downside is, every one in her class has the feeling that they've slept with her before and when she's exposed, everyone starts acting like they've known her for years.

1b. Anti-piracy measures are no joke in the future. Download or pirate porn and you might find your body stripping naked and walking to the nearest police station to report yourself.

1c. As per usual, vanilla only brings in a bit of cash, the real money is in the kinks and the more extreme and realistic, the better. A woman who wants to get rich quick keeps engaging in more and more extreme and varied sex so she can sell the experience online. A possible highlight is running a red light so a cop will pull her over and she can try to seduce them. However, it fails and she winds up in lock up...no reason she can't try a new angle.

2. Transcendence. The human mind need no longer be trapped in a physical form and some people take it to the extreme, having pleasure correxes added to their metal constructs so they can still feel pleasure.

2a. Older husband gets transcended so he can stay with his younger wife and their kids. More innocently, he tucks his kid in and makes sure they both get proper nutrition. More kinkily, he has full control over the house and it's appliances. While kid's at school, he takes mom in the shower with the vibrating head and later drives their car while making the seat vibrate.

2b. New fetish, tie the house to yourself and then have a party there. All the dancing and fucking sends a number of pleasures up your digital spine

 

[Hypoxia]

Social dystopia is the strong sub-theme of cyberpunk -- destruction of the middle class, extreme have-vs-have-not polariity, ubiquitous surveillance by corporate+gov't fascist forces, environmental devastation, etc. (Mussolini, who coined the term, defined fascism as the corporate takeover of gov't.)

In a cyberpunk world we should expect all downloaded pr0n, like psychedelic & narcotic drugs, are actually supplied by the fascist combine to keep the populace dazed, under control -- bread & circuses of the future. Various military and corporate factions fight for power, of course, and ship the drugs, pr0n, embedded mind-control chips, etc that best support their goals.

Ah yes, the cryptic chips that provide direct neural access to the CloudWeb, embedded at birth by whatever faction rules your area. Rebels and hackers may try to replace birth chips by customized versions with different ports and backdoors -- but any chiplegger is likely a tool of another fascist faction, so you've merely switched to a new slaveowner.

Any fascist combine may push chips providing super-orgasms because their users will likely be too distracted by sex to be politically bothersome. And the combine can switch-off orgasms for those who dare dissent. Control sex and you control people. "When you've got'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow," as the Vatican has known for a long time.

Sure, we can write erotica set in such an environment. But it'll be weird.

 

[Strangebuddy]

Eh, I don't think it has to be all that dour and making people born with chips is a bit too much effort. While corporate control and dystopias are a common idea, they're not must-haves. I'd also argue that a prevailing theme is more apathy than anything else. The megacorps don't give a shit about you and will press you under heel, not because they need to or even want to, you just were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They're like minor Lovecraftian entities: not cosmically powerful but beyond conventional means of being hurt, too powerful to ever be stopped, and they care not a thing for the huddling masses that they force their products on.

As for erotic content, there's quite a few options. For example, in Transmetropolitan, sex is cheap and transactional but it also is shown as one of the few ways of truly connecting and showing love (you have to look for that a bit but it's there). Maybe the story is just between a couple of lovers who do the unthinkable and turn off all their gadgets to make love (Tokyo Ghost sort of had this, the leads escape LA (which is a "SWEET MERCIFUL CRAP' dark dystopia) and go to Tokyo where a persistent EMP field knocks out all tech and allows the male lad to finally go cold turkey from all the media he was (in some ways literally) pumping into his system...they then have a ton of sex...and then things go south but that would be spoiling things and it's a quick read so I'd suggest reading it if you get the chance). Or maybe the tech allows them to connect when their bodies wouldn't.

One idea I had is a short story about a guy who takes quick little breaks from his job to jack into a sex club. and due to the difference in time between the new servers and reality, he can have hours of perversion with his hook-ups by the time a single minute passes in the regular world. He can't really escape his drudgery filled life but for a few minutes he can engage in raw unbridled passion. He also could possibly find a coworker who also is secretly jacking into the same club.

 

[sunandshadow]

I like the more utopian version where the economy has become independent of humans (computers growing crops and instantly producing custom clothes and furniture and such) and people mostly goof off all day, though society is somewhat unhealthily focused on celebrities as a result. Those celebrities include writers though, so, some of us might consider that a perk.

Tanith Lee's Biting The Sun is a good reference. John Varley's Steel Beach too, if you ignore the plot about the central computer being unable to come with human paradoxicality.