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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't it?

• A global health crisis forces a generation of children to socialize and be educated via primitive virtual reality, while corporate headquarters (and some cities) become ghost towns.

• Groups resist technology (vaccines, masks) because of conspiracy theories about origin, control, and autonomy. Resistance screeds and memes are spread by politicians and corpos built to profit from personal information and engagement uber alles.

• Countless deaths prevented by previously unheard-of biotech advancements created by global pharmaceutical companies in a suspiciously short timeframe. Fragile global systems like supply chains shatter like uncooked spaghetti. Surveillance technology deployed to people's personal devices. Etc.

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It is a good set-up. We’re just perpetually in the “events leading up to the international cybercorp wars” stage.

I think the real world is not separated nicely into backstory and actual story, so we’ll kind of bumble along for better or worse instead of hitting some grand moment of change.

Near future fiction needs that dramatic moment to neatly jump from the present to the setting.

Well, corporate warfare is just warfare since the megacorporations have essentially purchased the governments of the Earth. Much of government regulation and market intervention is a result of regulatory capture, and voting effectively achieves very little other than keeping the people fighting each other while the megacorporations and ultra wealthy divide the spoils.

Yes, your recounting is like a bad novella.

None of that is really cyberpunk, though. The second is the result of people believing they live in a post-apocalyptic dystopia when they don't, but in an actual cyberpunk story the conspiracy theories would have been correct. The health crisis would have been manufactured by black ops pharmaceutical companies working with the CIA, and COVID vaccines would have contained nanotech that let corporations insert AI code into people's minds through the screens that people were now forced to spend an inordinate amount of time in front of.

The protagonists would be a ragtag group of antivaxxers and anarcho-primitivists simply trying to survive outside without getting eaten by cyberzombies or sniped by Boston Dynamics killbots while the New World Order tries to force the populace into some kind of capitalist Instrumentality.

We're not there yet, but give it ten, maybe fifteen years. At least one (maybe two or three, to account for cultural osmosis from parenting) generation entirely raised in a world in which consensus reality and culture are entirely created and managed by AI, genetic engineering and cybernetics (particularly AR and brain-machine interfaces) become common, and the breakdown of large-scale and complex societal structures due to climate change really begins, leading to corporate micronations, crypto economies and autonomous government. When relationships between people and technology become primarily parasocial and psychosexual.

> The protagonists would be a ragtag group of antivaxxers and anarcho-primitivists simply trying to survive outside without getting eaten by cyberzombies or sniped by Boston Dynamics killbots while the New World Order tries to force the populace into some kind of capitalist Instrumentality.

The heroes always have to be the "ragtag group of outsiders and vigilantes" and the conspiracy always has to be true, otherwise it's just not an interesting fictional story.

I'd argue that our world is more and more cyberpunk, but the real life good guys aren't the fictional cyberpunk protagonists, nor are they the New World Order stormtroopers.

This framing shifts responsibility to an abstract virus, rather than the human response.

Early statistics showed the overwhelming majority of people would be fine if exposed to the virus, given that at least half of people were asymptomatic. Older people with comorbidities were at higher risk, though survival was still the order of 98%+. The overall mortality was on the order of the 1968 Hong Kong flu, which most people have forgotten. Children especially were never at significant risk. The choice to lock down and do Zoom schooling was at the cost of the youth, which have seen marked declines in academic performance and increases in mental illness. We can see that nations like Sweden which never locked down turned out fine.

The virus emerged from Wuhan, where there was the virology lab working on gain of function for coronaviruses. The NIH had funded such research while Fauci was leading the organization. A revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA helped lead to the suspiciously rushed vaccines, while restricting the release of Pfizer's trial data until 2096. The mandates did not make sense since the vaccines were shown to not limit transmission. Given how many boosters some people are on now, they are probably some of the least effective vaccines of all time, compared to the actual good ones for smallpox and polio.

Supply chains shattered, or in other words, the trade war that Trump initiated against China had escalated. The virus was the compelling justification to shut down factories, causing supply shocks across the world, demonstrating the foolishness Neoliberal globalist economic policy and just how dependent the West had become on manufacturing based in a hostile totalitarian state. Monetary policy in response to the supply shocks caused widespread inflation and reduced living standards for young Americans with little wealth.

Authoritarianism, surveillance, and censorship expanded, which was already the long term trend in the West as its elites seek to emulate the strengths of the Chinese state.

> rather than the human response.

I can agree that the government's response in 2020 was horrible, and those people at the top should be held accountable for that awful response.

> Early statistics showed the overwhelming majority of people would be fine if exposed to the virus,

Hospitals were overwhelmed. That was the concern. The people who were "fine"? Many of them did so only because they were hospitalized. If we just exposed everyone to it all at once, it would have been a lot worse.

> We can see that nations like Sweden which never locked down turned out fine.

If by "turned out fine" you mean having significantly more deaths than neighboring countries and still suffering economic issues, sure.

> survival was still the order of 98%

Survival rate ignores long-term damage, which we are still learning about today, and is an ignorant statistic to use. It's why many disasters talk about casualties and not just deaths. It's like saying less than 1.5% of the children in Uvalde survived.

> The virus emerged from Wuhan, where there was the virology lab...

And not a single US Intelligence agency has come out strongly in favor of the Wuhan Lab theory, beyond one saying it's "plausible."

> Supply chains shattered, or in other words, the trade war that Trump initiated against China had escalated... Monetary policy in response to the supply shocks caused widespread inflation and reduced living standards for young Americans with little wealth.

The argument here being that it was Trump's trade war with China that increased inflation and reduced living standards...

If by "turned out fine" you mean having significantly more deaths than neighboring countries and still suffering economic issues, sure.

And significantly fewer deaths than countries that closed schools for years or arrested people for walking alone in parks.

Survival rate ignores long-term damage, which we are still learning about today, and is an ignorant statistic to use.

Ok, just also make sure to include the psychological and economic costs of NPIs, which we are also still learning about. Remember the teacher's unions saying that learning loss was a myth and kids are "resilient"?

And not a single US Intelligence agency has come out strongly in favor of the Wuhan Lab theory, beyond one saying it's "plausible."

Two agencies lean toward a lab leak, others toward natural origin, none with high confidence (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...). A lab leak origin is perhaps less likely than the alternative, but it's a entirely reasonable hypothesis.

> And significantly fewer deaths than countries that closed schools for years or arrested people for walking alone in parks.

Which country had schools closed for years? Not the US.

> Ok, just also make sure to include the psychological and economic costs of NPIs, which we are also still learning about. Remember the teacher's unions saying that learning loss was a myth and kids are "resilient"?

Oh, the "I want to kill my parents to save the economy" argument. Gotcha. Just to be clear, which of your parents would you off to save your 401k?

I'll answer your question once I know where you land on that.

> Two agencies lean toward a lab leak, others toward natural origin, none with high confidence (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...). A lab leak origin is perhaps less likely than the alternative, but it's a entirely reasonable hypothesis.

Plausible. The world you are looking for is plausible, and only one of the two, out of more than a dozen. Only one is plausible, not two. And plausible does not mean, in any way, "leaning toward." So no.

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