china, the place to experience real life cyberpunk? Options

[hobgoblin]

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/23/china...h-tech-und.html

only thing missing is some guy with a full chrome arm.

[kxU]

wasn't china where that one guy who got his junk lopped off in an accident had a fake one surgically implanted? and it ended up creeping out him and his wife so much that they later removed it? now that's cyberpunk!

[Saint Sithney]

I've seen what happens when masses of unemployed young tech heads develop significant density.

I think we may be looking at a potential Chinese hipster explosion of massive proportions.
Perhaps, with that sort of density, their keffiyehs will all get caught together until they form a writhing ball of hipsters known only as the legendary Hipster King...

[Martin_DeVries_I...]

All pale limbs wiggling in the sun, the individuals only identifiable by the Doc Martens and Converse sticking out of the mass of all-too-hipper-than-thou flesh. A katamari of vague detachment, and with each new hipster pulled in by their "ironic" Christmas Sweater a chorus of voices rise up in an awful din. "Oh, sure:" the doomed wail, an audible smirk echoing off of the city walls, "Interpol's okay, I guess. I mean, personally I was over them once Carlos D. grew that goatee. But I guess some folks still like them. Maybe next you want to check out Block Party? Poseur."

[phlapjack77]

I'm living in Beijing at the moment, and while I can attest to seeing some of the absolute low / street lifestyle stuff, I haven't yet felt like Beijing could be "Shadowrun". It IS a little strange to go from modern-life to absolute destruction / squalor in just a city block. In my last apartment, I lived in what would have been a normal 2-bedroom apartment in the US. But this one had some cheap plywood boards set up as "walls", giving us about 10 tiny "bedrooms". One of these bedrooms had 4 guys in it, all in the tech / computer / graphic design fields. Crazy.

I've heard Shanghai is alot more futuristic-y...will visit soon...

Now Tokyo, in my imagination, is what it's all about, cyperpunk-wise. Maybe because so much cyberpunk fiction is set there (well, the fiction that counts, anyway (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) ).

[hobgoblin]

funny enough i think the GITS movie was set to hong kong.

[hermit]

china, the place to experience real life cyberpunk?

Yes. Only place to ride a real maglev, too.

funny enough i think the GITS movie was set to hong kong.

Very cyberpunk, Hong Kong. The GitS movie was set in a city built over Tokyo Bay though.

For punk riots under neon-coloured high rises, bioted suits, brutalised cops and hideously aggressive gangs, though, France is the place to go. Seriously, the French are a rough bunch. You walk along the Eiffel Tower during new year's, suspecting no evil, and suddenly find yourself in a riot, have your jacket burning, and then the cops start shooting concussion grenades. You can see black-clad cops beat down some Maghrebian kid in the open, on a metro station (bibliotheque CDG, if you want to know exactly). There also are cavernous, neon-lit catacombs with weird people living in them and more homeless folks than you can shake a stick at. And take the wrong metro and you end up in a place where you feel realy naked wothout a bulletproof vest, passing by shantytowns built in back alleys that make chinese rural villages look like affluent places.

Really, France, I didn't expect you to be like that.

[hobgoblin]

ah, i see how it got things confused. Seems the visual design was based on hong kong but the movie was not set in hong kong.

[hermit]

Yes, visually, it was very Hong Kong, I agree. With a healthy dose of Shanghai.