Utrecht said:
- Megacorps - The simple fact of the matter is that there is no way that a corporation will ever (under current social settings) have the resources that a nation has (even a relatively poor one like Gambia)
I disagree that this is unfeasible in a cyberpunk setting.
Disclaimer: None of these are necessarily accurate representations of today's world, but rather a distorted perspective on it to show how dystopian trends could be created and expanded on.
With some semantical arm twisting you could posit that Osama bin Laden came close to buying a country through family wealth gained through corporate power. Osama isn't even all that rich relative to the top ten. Bill Gates has around 200 times as much wealth.
I don't have the exact figures with me, but the rate of CEO pay relative to average employee pay in corporations has grown by an order of magnitude since the 1980's. Top CEO's and other experts sit in committees/are consulted to establish each other's pay rates when a given CEO comes up for compensation adjustment. They like to hike the pay rates up for other CEOs as high as they can. That way, when their turn for review comes up they can use the other people's inflated pay rates (which they set in the first place) as examples of what the market will bear for their own compensation. I don't know if this has changed in the last year or so though, with the new economic climate. This is a trend that could also be distorted/extrapolated into the future to further increase the gap between rich and poor, and giving the rich more economic power, which they can use to buy political influence.
Also, if you dramatically extend and distopian-ize (as I'm not saying that this is how the system works today) the lobbying and campaign contribution system in the USA, for example, you end up with a system of government sanctioned bribery that basically ends up with the country run by those with the deepest pockets. Play off of the Enron fears and suspicions.
Also look at how Russia's privatization of formerly public holdings went over after the collapse of the USSR, ushering in the modern era of Robber Barons. Play with a few facts here and there and you have another model for how corporation interests can own government in the modern world.
Of course you don't have to have strong corporate power in a cyberpunk world, but I think that the roots of such a thing definitely exist in today's world to enough extent that you could extrapolate them into the future and make them much worse. I also think that it's a very interesting and important part of a future world if you want something dystopian. The growing divide between rich and poor can not be entirely economic. There should be political manifestations as well or else the power has no way of reinforcing itself and surviving.
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On another topic, one thing I do see is an impending population and environmental crisis in the near future. This plays out in a huge number of ways. Right now they are suspecting that the severe dust storms in Beijing this season could be caused in part by desertification from environmental degradation. They also think that, at the projected rate of desert expansion, it's possible that some day Beijing just might get swallowed by the desert and will have to be abandoned. Deserts are growing quickly in several parts of the world. I see colonization of the ocean in the future as an interesting proposition. Both with stationary floating cities with hydroponic and underwater farms as well as giant, moving, boat communities - kind of like a never-ending Carnival Cruise on steroids. I see the ocean as a huge untapped resource for real estate, food, and fresh water (although we need vastly improved de-salination technology). With such geographically disconnected communities the satellite network infrastructure continues to become much more important, with the virtual space becoming more important than actual space (since with mobile communities actual space is constantly in flux - the real world's concept of space starting to model itself after the virtual world).
Oh - and what I think could perhaps be the single most important thing to update cyberpunk to mesh with today would just be a cosmetic change: Change cyberpunk to cyberrave (or somesuch) and implement the associated stylistic/mood/atmosphere/fashion changes. Lose the mohawks, and leather jackets, cut back a little on piercings and tattoos, and replace them with DJ's and more synthetic and flashy materials for clothing. Then replace punk's spartan political angst nihilistic aesthetic with the rave's luxurious decadent and hedonist aesthetic. This last aesthetic change has some huge implications that ricochet throughout the overall vision of the world.
I think that a huge part of building a gripping and successful vision of the future is looking at what is on peoples' minds today and building off of it. Here are some examples: Terrorism, easy access to chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, genetic technology gone the way of Dr. Moreau, Enron, religious extremism, civil liberties compromised without protest in the name of security, current fashion trends, increased access to cheap drugs, increased liberalization of sex (the history of the politics behind the sex industry during this century is actually very interesting), globalization of trade, merging of political entities into larger units(EU, UN) and increasing power of these entities, increasing high profile corporate mergers, government's light stance against monopoly power, Japan's waning power and China's rising power, increased use of multinational police forces and collaboration between military in different countries, assymetrical warfare, etc.
Throw all of that together today into a huge stew pot and you get something a little different from what you would have gotten 20 years ago. Often powerful descriptions of the future are more relevant to the contemporary world that creates them than they are to an actual realistic model of how the world will actually turn out. Bringing up troubling issues in the future is a way of exploring them in proxy for the present. It serves the quite useful purpose of letting us explore them while still maintaining emotional distance. You can take controversial topics and then reinvent them into something that is not so controversial because it's "fiction." *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*
That's my take on how to bring Cyberpunk up to date.
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