Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - Things worth having in a Cyberpunk Campaign

patchwork · 09-08-2021, 05:04 PM

The power of Muses using social media networks.

The initial seed isn't my idea; I'm remembering an old story in which a depressed person sits alone on a park bench, the pokecon on their phone pings the pokecon on the phone of a person in line at the nearest Starbucks of an appealing gender and with a healthy bank balance and tells them to order the depressed person's favorite drink in addition to their own. They do so, of course; their pokecon told them to. Then, by direction, they take it to the depressed person and give it to them with a smile. The antagonists who burst on to the scene and attempt to arrest everyone for fraud are the IRS; in pursuit of their owner's mental health, the pokecons are doing a good enough job starting a gift economy that it is becoming impossible to know the income of a middle class person with any precision, and the IRS is ill-equipped in many directions for levying taxes against social networks instead of individuals.

Now kick that up to the next level of invasiveness; people are spending their spare time hanging out with who their pokecons tell them to hang out with. Your schedule consistently has an open slot thursday night, the pokecon finds a crew at a bar who are an 86% match for values and interests with you, you go to the bar and sit at the table your pokecon tells you to while their pokecons tell them ahead of time that a new person will be joining them tonight. I leave attempts at business and artistic partnerships, and romantic partnerships, enabled by pokecons as a further exercise.

But anyway, yeah. A therapy app such as Replika, advanced another TL. Its users are going to trust it to make small decisions for them, and the apps talk to each other to organize things, and some agencies will feel deeply threatened by them even as they significantly improve public mental health (and these slightly-saner people see entrenched agencies trying to take their pokecons away, and are already connected with friends that see things similarly because the pokecons ensured it would be so). Compromising pokecon networks, from inside or out, could be a significant hacking activity. And of course this only applies to people with the discretionary income to maintain their pokecon, because cyberpunk.

09-08-2021, 05:04 PM	#3
patchwork Join Date: Oct 2011	Re: Things worth having in a Cyberpunk Campaign The power of Muses using social media networks. The initial seed isn't my idea; I'm remembering an old story in which a depressed person sits alone on a park bench, the pokecon on their phone pings the pokecon on the phone of a person in line at the nearest Starbucks of an appealing gender and with a healthy bank balance and tells them to order the depressed person's favorite drink in addition to their own. They do so, of course; their pokecon told them to. Then, by direction, they take it to the depressed person and give it to them with a smile. The antagonists who burst on to the scene and attempt to arrest everyone for fraud are the IRS; in pursuit of their owner's mental health, the pokecons are doing a good enough job starting a gift economy that it is becoming impossible to know the income of a middle class person with any precision, and the IRS is ill-equipped in many directions for levying taxes against social networks instead of individuals. Now kick that up to the next level of invasiveness; people are spending their spare time hanging out with who their pokecons tell them to hang out with. Your schedule consistently has an open slot thursday night, the pokecon finds a crew at a bar who are an 86% match for values and interests with you, you go to the bar and sit at the table your pokecon tells you to while their pokecons tell them ahead of time that a new person will be joining them tonight. I leave attempts at business and artistic partnerships, and romantic partnerships, enabled by pokecons as a further exercise. But anyway, yeah. A therapy app such as Replika, advanced another TL. Its users are going to trust it to make small decisions for them, and the apps talk to each other to organize things, and some agencies will feel deeply threatened by them even as they significantly improve public mental health (and these slightly-saner people see entrenched agencies trying to take their pokecons away, and are already connected with friends that see things similarly because the pokecons ensured it would be so). Compromising pokecon networks, from inside or out, could be a significant hacking activity. And of course this only applies to people with the discretionary income to maintain their pokecon, because cyberpunk.