Emergence and the future of the present, Food for thought, some spoiling tidbits Options

[MaxHunter]

I am reading a Emergence and I must say I am enjoying the read. The book actually is not much use for my current campaign -though some ideas are nice- However, I like the way its written. And It made me wonder about a few things:

Hopefully you have read some discussions here about cyberpunk being the future seen from America of the 80's and the 90's with the japanacorps threatening the US's sense of security and all. If not, visit the link here

Then I am reading the chapter of Emergence dubbed "Witchunt" and it hit me like a parallel of some of todays' feelings and concerns; i.e. Emergence as the future imagined from America today. This is why

[ Spoiler ]

-Society's sense of security shattered by an act of terror /the hong kong incident/

-an heterogeneous collective portrayed as crazy, dangerous and evil. /technomancers/
Decent people being rounded up, suspected upon and investigated just for the reason of belonging to that collective. /All technomancers are terrorists!/ A sense of paranoia and suspicion disrupting the confidence of previously integrated cities. /Just what's that freaky neighbour doing.../

-corporate and media spin to scare people in order to profit from the turmoil and to distract public opinion from shadier deals.

-Dubious security firms spawning everywhere to take advantage of the increase in security funds

-freedom restricting laws imposed to further control people under the pretend of "security"

For example: let's take one of Aufhenben posts - I hope I am not breaking any copyright law by copying this tiny part here, If I am, I apologize-

"-Bullshit. This is nothing but sensationalistic crap designed to
scare people. Scared people buy lots of products they don’t need
to “protect� themselves and their loved ones. Scared people let
the authorities take drastic measures to deal with perceived
threats. Scared people don’t ask questions when the authorities
tell them what to do. Scared people don’t complain when their
civil rights are violated in the interest of “security.� Refuse to be
scared, people.
> Aufheben"

I found the fact that Clockwork is a hobgoblin and thus probably from a Middle Eastern culture particularly ironic.

Emergence is certainly not something that could have been written anytime but today.

Max

[Rotbart van Dain...]

Look, 1984 and V for Vendatta are quite old.

It's just the mainstream is finally catching on.

[Marwynn]

I don't know man, such themes have been around for quite a while. I think it must've been present in the earlier years of Shadowrun too. Certainly when it was written and the background was fleshed out that the writers knew how goblinization and magical-freaking-powers would scare people and lead to abuses.

This is more akin to the cliche: "the more things change the more they stay the same".

It's another group that you can sensationalize for no apparent reason. There are dragons, there are sorcerors and spirits, there are orcs, trolls, dwarves, and elves armed with frightening technology and/or magic, and now you get people with a commlink for a brain.

Ooooh. Weren't the freaking dead rising just last decade with SURGE?

The theme of the need to feel secure instead being secure is not that new. In fact, it's been around for quite a while. Most recently in popular works, but the founding of the US was also quite tinged with that.

It just seems to be forgotten every now and then.

[MaxHunter]

Well, but 1984 was more about fascism and stalinism than terrorism... Which is what I think Emergence is somehow talking about.

I mean mood and topic more than theme... it's not just the broad strokes about insecurity and the role of authority, but finer points that I am talking about.

Though I can not say I disagree with neither of you as well, just that we are focusing on different aspects of the parallel.

Cheers,

Max

P.S. I loved 1984, in a scared kind of way.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

[tweak]

The general population follows the media like slaves.

We see the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" win an award. Yesterday, we see a concert to save the planet from global warming. The very idea of global warming is so abstract it can be compared to the war on drugs or the war on terrorism.

The world today is living in high level abstract ideas. We are trying to fix problems that are so abstract that solutions are also abstract. There was an ad about re-using bottles to reduce the use of plastic bottles for water. But no mention was made of soda products or energy drinks that use plastic. Water is abstract enough that we do not have to talk about actual products that use plastic.

If you take this problem out into the future, we create a world that controls us via ideas. You no longer need to use force. You can use scare tactics.

Here's a statistic that definitely impacts my surroundings:

* half of marriages end in divorce

That statistic has been used to reduced the number of families in America. How many people are now afraid to get married? Fear is a very powerful motivator.

You want to eliminate Shadowrunners -- call them terrorist. Then, declare a war against them. That's very abstract, but it would make Shadowrunner's lives more difficult. How do you identify a Shadowrunner? Keep that answer abstract enough and now you have street/corporate wars that the population would support outside of the shadows.

[hobgoblin]

how do you get control over a large group of people, and make them cooperate? make them fear a external threat of some sort.

hell, i have long been thinking that without some external threat (communism, terrorism, whatever) good "old" USA would implode and fragment.

but i have also read some interesting stuff about EU, and how is being formed and enlarged. a similar way of gaining control was performed by bismarck when creating a greater germany by banding together the different smaller germanic states.

basically he set up a walled market, and requested that anyone wanting access to said market would have to bow to a central office.

one can even see USA as a similar walled market. its just that as of today there are not much real producting happening inside said walled market...

[bibliophile20]

[hobgoblin]

[Buster]

[hobgoblin]

or how about churchill, i think he said something like "those that have a firm belief in the democratic system, have not talked to the avarage voter"...

[Talia Invierno]

Fear and dread are two different emotions. Fear has a clear here-and-now cause, and when that cause goes away the fear ends. Dread is nebulous, and tends to be focused on what could happen in an indefinite future. Where negative emotions are manipulated, be it by politics or media, it's almost invariably dread that is invoked rather than fear: because fear is too easily ended.

Actually, SR1 started at a point in the timeline where most of the initial fear/rage/dread of magic had already been resolved, even if it lingered in memory and kept being played with by the mass media and a few politicians. I think this was not an accident.

(Interestingly, reaction to magic seems to have largely been shifted into specific nationalistic xenophobias.)

I'll re-post here part of what I wrote in the Emergence Review:

[Buster]

I still don't see people acting that way against just technomancers. "I'm in ur commlink reading ur emailz" just doesn't have the same visceral impact as "I'm in ur head making u murder kidz." If people started freaking about paranormal activity, it would be across the board engulfing magicians as well as technomancers.

[hobgoblin]

dont forget about the AR game in SR4 ;)

if something like that can make people jump down from a high bridge, think about similar stuff can do if your not aware of whats going on?

want to make someone kill kids? throw some AR sensory mods in there that make the target think said kids are some kind of demons or similar.

[Talia Invierno]

Quite apart from just how much tech -- including the physically destructive kind -- technomancers (and deckers generally) now seem able to influence and even re-direct:

... how much nervousness is there, even in the world of today, over identity theft?

[Buster]

I'm not saying people wouldn't be afraid of technomancers, quite the opposite. I'm saying someone who can summon demons that can bring down an airplane would invoke a whole lot more "nervousness" than someone who can steal your credit card numbers.

[hobgoblin]

who needs to summon a demon? make the planes autopilot think its upside down or something ;)

or just send in a spirte to take over the show :vegm:

[Particle_Beam]

However, people do mostly believe what the media tells them, and if the media tells them that Technomancers have the ability to blow up your house by manipulating the matrix, people will panick, even if it isn't true. Of course, a mage could probably also blow up your house by summoning superpowerful spirits and casting superpowerful spells, but people also think that they can recognize magicians (they all walk with fetishes, arcane symbols, glowing magical stuff and tribal jewelry around, as everybody knows. And they're either beautiful women, really ugly metahuman shamans, stylish clothed men, or a ninja. :P ), so they don't fear them that much anymore.

But nobody knows how a Technomancers really looks like.

[hobgoblin]

yep, the unknown factor is very important.

what man dont understand he fears
what he fears he hates
what he hates he destroys

this is a repetated pattern in all of history...

[Big D]

How about this, then?

"TMs are out to cause Crash 3.0. They want to destroy civilization."

Mages have been mainstreamed since early on. There are colleges that teach magic, mage heros on the trid. The public may not really understand mages, but they have an image that satisfies them. Although they're aware that some mages can do really, really evil things, they are aware of enough "good" mages that there aren't witch hunts anymore. Certainly, a similar attitude *could* have developed towards mages after the GGD, but there were so many other things going wrong the first two decades, that it didn't crystalize public opinion.

TMs, otoh, are completely new, the public doesn't know what they are or where they came from or what they want, and we just survived the near destruction of civilization--really, to the Average Joe, with the Crash and the nukes and everything, how frightened must they be that whoever was behind it all is behind the TMs, trying to wipe out civilization again?

[Talia Invierno]

Plus the mage(ocrats) now have a significant political and corporate presence, along with the associated powerful lobby groups. Magic is restricted even more than the traditional top of the pyramid elite, simply by a dice roll of the genes: so even the classic rich/poor resentment is diluted. (Mages may be resented, but not in the way of enjoying the power behind daddy's money.) In the same way as modern legislation is passed by the higher strata of society to preserve their way of life, the magical political movement will be looking out for their own self interest at every level.

(Suddenly I'm wondering where that new fashion style originated from, which makes everyone want to dress up in a pseudo-magic style.)

Decking had been much more of the low-level equaliser that anyone could learn to do: which could even mean that a focus on decking and datasteal is disproportionately common among the poorer, less politically powerful classes.

[Zen Shooter01]

Here's an idea that media has been pushing since the '60s - all the cool kids are anti-American.

The Red scare? Total fabrication. The USSR was a big, friendly empire with the public goal of word domination, the largest intelligence/counterintelligence outfit in the history of our species, a nuclear arsenal sufficient to wipe out all life in the solar system, and a demonstrated tendency to seize countries and not give them back. Like the ones in eastern Europe. What were we so afraid of?

Muslim fundamentalism? Big joke. Why be afraid of an international cell network the public goal of which is the destruction of western civilization and the murder of everyone who doesn't think exactly like them? Why be afraid of the people who have made Somalia and Iraq and Manhattan hells on earth? Why be afraid of people who measure the success of an operation in the number of civilian casualties?

It's all been blown out of proportion by the White House. To make you buy more Starbucks so you can be alert for the next "car bomb". :please:

In relation to Emergence, people have good reason to be afraid of technomancers. With nothing more than force of will, than can drive your car into a wall with you in it, clean out your bank accounts and issue a warrant for your arrest as a serial rapist, turn off the fire suppression in your home and turn on the gas, and maybe even cause the end of civilization with Crash 3.0.

Not all technomancers are evil (nor all Russians, nor all Muslims). But it's telling the good from the bad that's the real trick. And some of them are very, very bad.

[Talia Invierno]

Yes ... the shadowrunners :spin:

[Buster]

Sheesh, they always have to blame the geeks for the nukes don't they? It isn't the politician's fault for starting a war, it's the technomancers. It's not Truman's fault Nagasaki and Hiroshima got flattened, no it's Oppenheimer's fault.

Well, the heck with politicians and mages and their fancy college degrees! We technomancers must unite to exterminate...uh, well perhaps I've said too much.

[knasser]