This is a universe with faster than light travel and near infinite resources. There’s a homeless shelter in one of the major cities. I helped them out. Why the fuck is there a homeless shelter in a universe with FTL and near infinite resources?
I’m starting to think Fallout under Bethesda isn’t a satire and their writers are just incapable of imagining anything beyond capitalism.
The thing that really stuck out to me about (the intro to) the Conquest Of Bread was that Kropotkin is just completely enamored with the technology of his day. He thought that there was easily enough to provide for everyone using the miracles of modern technology. In 1892.
So yeah, I think the scarcity will continue until capitalism goes away, and post-scarcity technology doesn’t mean the end of capitalism unless people successfully do something about it.
It would have been worse if they made a game with space capitalism that didn’t have the problems of capitalism in it. I would have also enjoyed the shit out of a game that let me play in a fully automated luxury gay space communism universe but I’m also ok playing a pirate in the space capitalist one too.
That’s what puts me off of so-called “post cyberpunk.” It decides that cyberpunk is over… without even trying to get past the inherent contradictions of capitalism. It’s just superficially nicer looking and the ego-insert protagonist gets a holo waifu.
I haven’t done any of the cyberpunk stuff yet. I spent like a minute in that city so far. It’s not good?
I’m not saying Starfield is post-cyberpunk. I’m saying that post-cyberpunk as a literature genre tends to bleach all the social issues framed in cyberpunk under a firehose of hopium instead of seeing those issues resolved meaningfully.
Starfield just rocketed past those issues and left them still sitting out there.
I always thought of Post Cyberpunknas things like The Diamond Age or Mirrors Edge or Glasshouse, which critique the individualistic response of a Cyberpunk protagonist vs social responses.
I am familiar with Mirror’s Edge, and if that’s post-cyberpunk, the setting has promise.
Much with cyberpunk libs took all the shiny white singularity dyson sphere bullshit and none of the “they made capitalism sentient and it ate the humanity of everyone who took part in it , then itself, then promptly collapsed into a post apocalytic economy made entirely of grifts.”
He wasn’t wrong. Scarcity is artificial.