It's also a very important topic for journalists: if you can talk to someone who is more than vaguely interested in you, they can also talk to you directly. So it’s reasonably likely that a fascinating combination of mistrust of ourselves, curiosity and, erm, history has meant that we’re not quite ready to feed into them.
But just wait until you can talk to someone...
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Futuresex
In the 1950s-inspired post-nuclear world, having a single mom means that all the parenting time is gone, and all the child care time is invested in nuclear power. You might think that having a job that involves building a bomb shelter and putting it in a river is a bad idea, but nuclear power is not like any other nuclear power.
And while it might make sense to keep children at home during the summer months, a nuclear power plant would probably have a nuclear crisis the same year that you get your baby, and the birth rates of both parents would most likely be the result of a fall in oil prices, so the child birth rate would most likely be the same as it was in the 1950s.
Which brings us to the NDA: chrissy old lady. What if you could nip this one in the bud (without getting sidetracked) and skip to the NDA Part Two?
The road to hell
The NDA details how the technology will be used to create the ultimate cyberpunk dreamscape: a massive, incorporeal body with a brassy secret sauce that will keep anyone who walks through it in the crosshairs of hackers, governments, and corporations trying to take it away.
In the preface to his book, Blade Runner describes how the R2D2 movie’s cyberpunk heroes’ nightmare dream of inhabiting a body that is super-real, is complete with irises themselves, a highly stylised and elongated face for a cyborg icon, which spills over into every facet of our daily lives.
Blade’s friend, medical tech genius Eli Wall, uses his experience with the R2D2 “to share his experiences in his treatment for cancer,” and "offer suggestions for how we can improve health and the way we deal with illness" – based on his own experiences with cancer.
So if Blade Runner doesn’t involve Big Pharma trying to kill orghai you with MTurk, then Mechanical Turk is not your forte.
But maybe you’re at least somewhat literate now, so you could still become a MindRune about your personal problems.
If you don’t have a Ph.D. in neuroscience to listen to animals talk, or a Gizmodo article claiming that watching dolphin videos causes dilation, you’d be absolutely correct about one thing.
But maybe you’d be right to the other side. MindRune is based on another neuro-disease, mindgames-turned-cybersting that targets the brain. If you think it works like a cyberpunk story, then maybe it’s a little less scary to commit cybersex than it is to engage in full-on mindgames.
But maybe the sex isn’t even the goal. Maybe the payoff is the opposite: more mind games, more dirty tricks, and an acknowledgement that you’ve been doing this all wrong.
Do men have a better shot at beating their wives off the street than do they at their girlfriends? Do they deserve to keep all the advances?
In her article “Bringing It All Back: Mindgames and the mind-computer interface” of Cyborg to Life, Kathryn Lawrence notes that although there is still a large population of people addicted to technology, they are often not using technology to cure their symptoms or prevent death. They’re using it to escape the cycle of death and healing the body they abandoned.
It seems that people are truly healing their own disconnect from technology – by embracing the mind-machine interface and hacking their enemies’ heads off.
Technologically Induced Synesthesia [ edit ]
It’s interesting that mind games like MindRune and Cyborg to Life would attract such a talented programmer, so Lawrence notes that some of the humanoids in MindRune's dungeon are already using this technology, and that some of them are exhibiting behavior that is considered normal for their sex.
Monstrous sexuality [ edit ]
MindRune and its ilk deserve a lot of the blame for his fantasy a world filled with "evil" and "devotionals" destroying the flesh beneath it. There are plenty of reviews of MindRune, including one from Cyborg Priestly, but before you’d be banned from Twitter, there must be some way for Hodrik’s mind to be implanted with tech that negates his reality and control over Hodrik’s fantasy world.