Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported

ryan , 6 months ago

We already exist in a cyberpunk world, and people are just beginning to wake up to it. Implants that go obsolete, corporations controlling everything, the general sense of despair because you can't change the system, only rebel in hopes of improving the immediate life of yourself and those around you...

vexikron , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I have been saying this for years now, and basically no one agrees with me or understands what I am saying.

The conversations usually boil down to ‘but we dont have cyberpunk fashion and aesthetics and there are no flying cars, and most people dont have robot arms so /obviously/ real life is not cyberpunk.’

This of course belies that basically every cyberpunk fan I know is a poser and doesnt get it.

The fashion and robotic arms and computer tech in everything that it doesnt need to be in are ultimately just world building and plot devices that make corporate control extremely obvious and in your face.

Like… its the setting. In which actual stories take place, and obviously the setting impacts people and their lives and choices.

The actual message of cyberpunk as a genre is basically: if we let corporations control everything via technology we are addicted to and cannot live without, our lives will become nasty brutish and short, love and friendship become commodities to be bought and sold, and real trust and happiness between people is basically impossible.

What was previously known as humanity itself dies in a techno-corporate world, mostly because it isnt profitable.

So you point to how that /has already happened in America/ in a myriad of ways that are more complicated and less obvious than the overt aesthetic and world features of cyberpunk literature… and that in some cases are in opposition to it… and people just yell that because the surface of our reality doesnt match the surface of cyberpunk, theres no way that the underlying facts are the same.

I once had someone vehemently argue to me that CyberPunk 2077 didnt look very cyberpunk to him… because it includes daylight, cyberpunk scenes always happen at night, man!

Right because there is corporate technological control over your life at so many levels you cannot hope to understand them all… and obviously those things can only happen at night. Mainstream computer soft and hardware just become non corporate and non privacy invading and non addictive and non exploitative when the sun is up. smh

Anyway yeah we live in a world where a huge swath of Americans are literally chemically addicted to social media apps and websites… and these apps and websites are known to cause mental disorders of all kinds, they exist to steal your information and sell you shit you probably dont need, the content they shove in your face is algorithmically optimized to make you /angry/, because angry people make the best social media addicts…

Yeah, its pretty obvious to me that instagram and tiktok and facebook are perfect corporate techno drugs and the country is full of addicts.

hakunawazo , 6 months ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a666baf4-80d3-4f03-b672-26c137fbd0ea.jpeg

FinishingDutch , 6 months ago

New Cyberpunk 2077 sidequest: hack the bionics company to restore people’s vision. Like a more murder-y version of Orbis.

dojan , 6 months ago

This sort of tech needs to be heavily regulated in how proprietary it can be; not at fucking all.

Icalasari , 6 months ago

At a minimum, one should be able to cut off access to the internet so a company can't EoS killswitch it/pull a Nintendo and send an EoS fuck you update that breaks any attempts to put control in the user's hands

Mind, that's a really fucking low bar, and would be depressing if that's all regulation guaranteed

dojan , 6 months ago

Yeah that bar is too low. Putting tech in someone to keep them alive or enhance their life somehow should come with some sort of permanent responsibility from somewhere. If the company goes bankrupt the expertise doesn’t just vanish, then make it a public responsibility to ensure that whoever was granted eyesight from some kind of implant, gets to keep that. Hell, make the technology and research public as well.

Bodyparts/functions should belong entirely to whomever possess them, a company going bankrupt doesn’t suddenly mean that someone should lose their ability to walk or whatever.

No company should be able to “own” someone’s bodypart, or their ability to perform a certain task or whatever. The notion is preposterous.

mats , 6 months ago

What did Nintendo do exactly? I know they pull off a lot of shit, but I have not heard about this

Icalasari , 6 months ago

When EoS came for 3DS, they sent out one last update to kill as many methods of accessing homebrew as possible

doctorcrimson , 6 months ago

I wonder what the costs would be to start a new company that works on the obsolete technology that Second Sight installed? I don’t expect the 350+ receivers of the implants to be affluent enough to make it a profitable venture but knowing exactly what it takes to make the help they need available again would be nice.

SatanicNotMessianic , 6 months ago

Can’t wait to get in line for that Elon Misk brain chip!

anarchy79 , 6 months ago

“I thought you said capitalism was the best system to run society because of the innovation!”

“Well yes, inventing things, we didn’t say we’d actually produce them. If you have complaints then you are free, thanks to capitalism, to take your business elsewhere”

jordanlund , 6 months ago

File suit under right to repair?

roguetrick , 6 months ago

Second Sight’s long-term plan was always to pivot to a brain implant that would bypass the eye altogether and directly stimulate the visual cortex.

The number of blind folks who are receptive to electrical retinal stimulation was always too small for this business model. These crooks knew that and pumped investors for a non existent hope that this would somehow translate into a non existent technology. Suprise suprise, you can't magic your way into these things.

The entire operation was always doomed to turn out this way.

zeekaran , 6 months ago

wired.com/…/our-medical-data-must-become-free/#.h…

Always happy to drop this link