this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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This future fucking sucks
This is the cyberpunk future that the 80s kids were so hyped for.
If anyone remembers the cyberpunk 80s TV show Max Headroom, then they know that TV was everywhere all the time in that universe. There was a scene in one episode where the police enter a suspect’s home and discover that she had an off switch on her TV. The cops react in shock to the fact, and one of them says “She’ll get twenty years for that.”
This universe also had "blipverts" which were a type of ad (advert..advertisement) that directly accessed your brain's motivation to get you to buy something. The only problem was that blipverts also had a high chance of killing the people that watched it.
This was a TV show from almost 40 years ago now and it looks like these would be the things that are coming in the next few years from now.
Sci-Fi dystopia/Cyberpunk has called a lot of things correctly.
Rather, rich people are copying dystopias
The torment nexus is very profitable.
The idea is even older. Orwell described telescreens - mandatory television with no off switch 77 years ago.
The blipverts were also several hours of ads in less than a second, which was the part that could kill you.
I loved in the story of that episode that the TV execs learned that blipverts could kill their audience, and briefly switched back to adverts, but when sales fell they went back to blipverts knowing the danger because it was more profitable. The writers of that show nailed a corporate dystopian future.
Our own hope was our protagonist Edison Carter "live and direct from Network 23"...who was also part of the giant corporate machine.
Alright Blank Reg.
As a 80s kid I don’t recall being hyped. If anything all sci-fi books were warnings for us. Younger generations embraced the black mirror shit thought.
Somewhere between Snow Crash and Hackers it became the dream instead of the nightmare.
True for hackers… Somehow it started my career… but snow crash feels a bit like Uber-gig which isn’t what I would look forward to.
For sociopaths like Musk, yes. The rest of us, not so much.
Except a lot less fun. That one at least had cool lights, cool buildings, and flying cars. We got rotting infrastructure and Teslas.
I actually commented on that somewhere. Cyberpunk is a good example of authors warning us of dystopian possibilities, not glorifying them.
And the kids were hyped over it, like i said.
We were hyped over the tech and the "punk" aspect. That's the rebellion against the dystopia, not embrace of it.
I no longer get excited about new tech. For the most part, I feel like we peaked about 10 years ago. Medical advances are the outlier and represent real benefit, but consumer electronics are getting enshittified.