It is through the seizure and utilization of retro imagery and attractive nostalgia that we may not only communicate memetically, but deny our enemies refuge within them.
@Zero_Democracy while i may be trying to abandon cyberpunk stuff for solarpunk, i think there is still a capacity for cyberpunk stories to really help people but also feel like that won't last for much longer because year after year im seeing banal things that visually are like cyberpunk but read more like exploitation films or are just appeals to power and systemic problems.
@mirzaba I don't mean to say that new things shouldn't be explored. Mostly that leaving established culture fallow lets bad actors pick it up and run with it, especially when nostalgia is a factor. Ideally, "cyberpunk" soon won't even be what you or I imagine when the term is invoked now.
Things born of a future that we had in the past are smoke in a closed room, and the later iterations of it are speculative. The interplay of the real and unreal is already apparent in things like fashwave. Opposing forces need to be mustered and deployed.
@Zero_Democracy Vapore/Retro wave anarchist stuff....I like a lot!
@wolfen I almost used this one towards the end:
@Zero_Democracy @wolfen Mad Max Headroom!
@Zero_Democracy this is important. I'm old enough to remember how the Hammerskins in Pink Floyd's The Wall were co-opted by actual fash (to the utter dismay of Gerald Scarfe), and in 1990s various attempts by hard right to co-opt the techno end of the rave scene (which was more "white" than the other EDM genres) in both UK and NL. On a better note attempts to make the NL and DE pirate radio subculture more rnationalist have mostly failed, in spite of its working class rural following..
@vfrmedia The twin hammers are staple imagery of actual fascist groups now, yeah.
There is not only an advantage and initiative in steering genres like cyberpunk into a more progressive tack, but a moral responsibility to be custodians of these aesthetics and media vectors, and to prevent them from being weaponized by malicious forces.