Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan joked in March: “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well.”
They really are just a bunch of amoebas reacting to stimulus.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan joked in March: “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well.”
They really are just a bunch of amoebas reacting to stimulus.
lol they’re calling it cyber psychosis now. Originally this was a word for how cis people imagined it would drive you mad when you have so many robot parts you do not recognize your body as yours anymore, which just proves once more that cyberpunk as a genre is wasted when you leave it to the straights.
I’m gonna go to bat for Mike Pondsmith here because he has since realized his 1970s idea about it was major ass and has since shifted the canon towards it basically being PTSD with the “welp, too much chrome!” explanation being a convenient in-universe scapegoat for the hellworld that his setting is. As in the augmentations don’t make crash out, it’s that most people who have insane amounts of augmentation are mercenaries or sex workers and that will pretty much just give you PTSD
Almost, unless he’s revised it further since I saw him explaining this: his idea is that extreme augmentations also make people more susceptible to trauma/exacerbate existing trauma by alienating them from humanity, while less intensive modifications leave people more grounded and able to hold on. Mike Pondsmith is an idealist lib, albeit a very endearing one who comes across as genuinely well meaning.
Cyberpunk 2077 did it a bit better, where it was a blend of scapegoat/urban legend, psychosomatic disorder primed by said urban legend, constant pain and disorientation from untreated complications associated with augmentation (eg inflammation and pain from the body rejecting an implant when someone ran out of immunosuppressants, the implant sending the wrong nerve signals to the brain, etc), and people experiencing traumatic incidents or suffering for prolonged periods of time. It basically went that people believed augments could make you snap and become something inhuman, they’d get heavily augmented for one reason or another, because they live in hellworld they don’t have reliable healthcare or maintenance and/or they’re constantly abused and beaten down by the world around them or actively attacked and tortured, and when they lash out in pain and/or fear and/or rage they both have a higher capacity for violence because of their implants and they’re primed to think they’ve passed some irreversible threshold where they’re just going to be hunted down and killed like a rabid animal so they keep lashing out or they go to ground and try to defend themselves.
But if captured alive and given treatment they calm down and recover from that psychotic episode, even if recovering from the trauma and health problems that led to it isn’t as easy.
In Cyberpunk Red or whatever it’s called, wasn’t there some sort of distinction made based on the type of augment where things that basically made you look or perform in a basically human way didn’t stress you much but if you turn your hands into laser whips and your bionic eyes see heat maps and radio waves, it’s easier to become estranged from your humanity?
IIRC all “cosmetic” cyberware had a 0 humanity cost, yeah.
My headcanon that is objectively better than Pondsmith’s is that cyberpyschosis is DRM to keep anybody from getting borged up enough to threaten the system.
That’s what it’s called in Cyberpunk 2077 if you go insane from your cybernetic augments and start murdering people
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