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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Well - social contributions will be worth something, that's the point. We (at the risk of manufacturing consensus) want a UBI society to look like the glass utopia from that one meme where everyone is fit, pleasant and driven, not cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk dystopias are defined by the social order itself being oppressive in one way or another, not by the behavior of the citizens - but regardless, if citizens' good behavior isn't producing anything I object to calling it "social contribution". If what we are talking about is some kind of social conformity tax, its advocates should own up to what they are proposing, without hiding behind language associated with the fair allocation of scarce resources between productive and non-productive members of an economy.

Many cyberpunk-adjacent works nowadays put focus not just on the oppression, but also on the ignoble state of the people.

That may be, but "evil state-sized megacorps make you pay through the nose for the very air you breathe" is still a core enough part of the aesthetic that "in order to avoid a cyberpunk dystopia, we should establish a regimented system where people get less food to eat depending on a social credit score" scans to me as almost comically backwards.

Hey, if we're talking megacorps, then presumably the people can pick which megacorp's social credit score they want to maxx. We could have a plausible explanation for the origins of different factions within one city, that way!

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