One core component to corporate dystopia, far more important than class divides and abuses of technology, is a culture of selfishness and superficiality in which people can't be bothered to examine anything past the surface or to participate in anything that does not obviously benefit them.

The subtitle of this little topic derives from the juxtoposition of cultures as presented in the reality TV series Cops and in the book/movie American Psycho.

Cops presents a world in which the police are perfect public servants who always win. The bad guys cannot get away and they are inevitably bad because of minor sleights rather than huge violent crimes. You see the police on Cops arrest people for drugs and domestic violence. Occasionally you see a little bit of shoplifting, some drunk driving, or a weapons violation. But no one ever tries to shoot it out with the cops and the people who run always fail. Likewise, the police are presented as perfect public servants without any failings. There is never any abuse and they never make mistakes.

On the other hand, American Psycho presents a world of superficiality. The protagnist is racist, sexest, classist, elitist, brutal, cruel, and unrepentant. He murders an uncountable number of people on a regular basis for no other reason than his own sadistic pleasure and he is very sloppy about it. Yet, he maintains a good life because no one dares to look past the thin and flimsy vineer that he presents to the world. He confeses to murders and his coworkers laugh as if he were making a joke. When his charnal house is discovered the owner doesn't call the police. She instead has the place cleaned and covers it up so that the place will be easier to rent.

So, I must ask exactly how selfish and superficial is the average wageslave in your world on the dystopian fiction scale, with Cops representing the peak of human selflessness, public service, personal responsibility, and dedication to justice and with American Psycho representing a world so selfish and superficial that the protagnist can murder countless people at random, drive stolen cars through buildings, get into shootouts with the police, and frequently confess to these crimes without any consequences whatsoever because no one wants to look below the surface and the people who do can't be bothered to act on what they see.

This, of course, goes toward how easy Shadowrunners have in it your world. In the world that sticks heavily to Cops, the Shadowrunners will inevetably be caught and punished for their crimes it is only just a matter of time. They must be perfect and leave no trace because a single trace is enough to send them down the river forever. The police are unbribable. Witnesses are forthcomming. Forensics labs do not make mistakes. Violence is out of the question and a single shot fired is as good as a failed run.

In the world of American Psycho things are a little different. The Shadowrunner has it easy. You can blow a man away in front of his best friend and the best friend worldn't even blink. Most people have trouble telling their friends apart, anyway. One less just makes things less complicated. In this world a suave face can get away with anything and only the poor and downtrodden have anything to fear from the police. Unsolved running shootouts are a common occurance and you'd have trouble finding a crime lab technition that you could trust not to masturbate onto the evidence. So long as the police don't catch you at the scene you never will be caught because no one cares. They'll clean up your evidence for you simply because it means less paper work for them.

While few SR worlds reach either extreme most lean towards one or the other. Personally, I prefer the American Psycho level of superficiality to the point where you can fire grenade launchers in public (assuming that random casualties are kept to a minimum) without getting on the evening news or the police blotter (because it would be too much of a for any survivor hastle to report) and a good face can impersonate a wageslave's best friend without anyone being the wiser because they are just that shallow.

Cops is a bad example, if for no other reason than because of the sheer amount of useless footage they have to go through to broadcast on 22-minute episode. CSI is a much better example of how exagerrated and stupid fiction can go in the opposite direction.

I'd say Cops is arguably just as stupid and exaggerated; it's a bad example not strictly because of how artificial it is, but because of the sociological implications of that artifice. But, I agree: better to keep both examples as fiction for comparison's sake.

We tend to avoid the extremes. Lonestar are made up of imperfect people but not all that corrupt. Some can be bribed, some don't even need bribing, some will be recording your clumsy attempts at bribery for the courts to watch later.

On the other hand, you really need catching at the scene to be reliably arrested. If you only used stun-rounds and nobody died, you are not worth the paperwork and 90% of the corps will not even report the crime. At check-points, the calm man with the hand-cannon who looks like he could kill everyone there in a second is waved through rather than make a fuss.

Kill someone and you are in trouble. Their friends will hunt you, hire other shadowrunners, put rewards on your head and generally make a nuisance of themselves. A corp will certainly tell the 'Star but will often change facts to protect themselves and so the evidence is harder to follow back to you. Kill a member of Knights Errant or Lonstar and they will track you down no matter the cost. (Lonestar in our version has a standing order that they never close the case if an officer is murdered and have a shoot-to-kill policy when apprehending cop-killers, even if it means shooting them after putting the cuffs on...)

The only episode of Cops I didn't turn off half-way was the X-Files episode. If only the real thing was more like that one.

That's a good question and well illustrated. Police certainly aren't infalliable in my setting and they're often corrupt. Not always in a bribery sense, but Lone Star are a private company and their bottom line is proft. They focus on achieving a healthy cost:reassurance ratio. That is to say if a crime doesn't impact on Those Who Matter, i.e. middle to upper class, then they wont throw a lot of resource at it because it's not the best use of resources when their aim is to stay in their employers good graces. Everything else is a variant on this. I.e. a high profile crime spree in a run down area that gets the native restless (thus making the gated communities nervous) will get their best efforts and these best efforts can be very good indeed. But mostly criminals in these areas get hassled for the easy petty crimes (enough to keep the appearance of order) whilst the big fish do what they like. Conversely a petty crime in a more affluent area will get you several concerned looking officers and a good attempt at nailing the perpetrator.

It's not unlike the real world, really. The purpose of the police is to keep those who pay their wages happy.

Thus for Shadowrunners, they really need to have an idea about where they are and who they're dealing with. In the American Psycho satire of people refusing to see what's right in front of them, that's very much there, but it's based on fear and greed rather than apathy, to my mind. I've gotten involved in fights where someone was being assaulted and other people were just standing around. Scary. But people seem to have this switch that goes off in their head which says "It's not my problem. It's not my responsibility." People have been raped by the side of the road and people will keep on driving past. That's cowardice. Shadowrunners can often count on that fear on the part of onlookers, so no - there wont be hordes of witnesses coming forward. I'll give them an advantage there. But it depends on the situation. The police might not care, and the public may look the other way, but their chief worry are the parties that really do have power. If they run against Saeder-Krupp, then they may find a lot more resources deployed against them than if they murder some poor SINless.

HTH.

I tend to go more American Psycho (although the superficiality is defined by the nuyen, not much else). The cops are bribable, but you have to compete with the fact that they're basically already bribed by the corps first and for more. The corps don't really care about the loss of human life as much as they do about the bottom line. If you are regularly killing off valuable employees, they'll hunt you down (or at least encourage you to visit one of their competitors). Of course, it really all depends on who we're talking about. Individuals tend to have relationships. You kill the brother of the CEO, and likely the whole corp will pursue you. You kill one of the family and the mafia will pursue (if only to make a point), so on and so forth.

Forensics are expensive, and so are only brought out and used to the level for which they're worth. Finding the killer of a middle management wageslave doesn't reduce the corp's death benefit to the family, so there's no reason to bring them in except to do the most basic level of data recording to detect a pattern if it arises (I imagine a quick sweep for prints and DNA which are checked against the SIN and DOJ databases would be about as far as they'd want to go. Nothing like the CSI super zoom vision where they spot half a sperm lost in the carpet so they can bring it in and ID it. Just dust the likely spots and leave.) I don't think anyone would even bother with doing ballistics in most cases. Guns are too prevalent and too cheap.

American Psycho works as an inspiriation to me for Johnsons.

Think about it for a second. You've got these incredibly powerful guys, who make a lot of money and regularly work with people who murder, demolish, and torture their way through life. Do they care?

Well, the successful ones don't. Or they're too disconnected (sort of like the protagonist from AP) to feel much one way or the other about it beyond their reaction to the shift in the bottom line.

Shadowrunners and wageslaves have a decent amount in common, IMO. Most of them are trying to get by. Some have chips on their shoulder about one thing or another, and will take them out on others (an elf-hating shadowrunner might specialize in wetwork in the Tir, whereas an elf-hating wageslave might go out of his way to not hire elves, or to give them the shit jobs, that kind of thing.

Johnsons are usually a cut above.

I would like to point out that bad things have certainly happened during the filming of COPS.

There have been shots fired, exchanges of gunfire, cameramen injured, and in at least one instance, the footage shot by the COPS cameraman was used to determine that a police officer who shot and killed a man did so with quite considerable justification - the fact that he was himself under fire at the time.

COPS cameramen go out in body armor. The cameramen have on occasion seen it nessessary to drop the camera and assist the officers in restraining particularly combative or psyched-out suspects.

These rarely if ever get aired. Why? Becaue COPS is prime-time. It's family TV. And in today's climate, little Jimmy can't get right up in the action with a shoot-and-scoot gun battle between cops and desperados. Not yet.

The ones that get aired are the ones that are entertaining without being too 'much' for little Jimmy and Janie Sue. Of course, they're getting more today than they did in 1989. But we ain't Shadowrun yet.

I have to agree that yuppies suck. NYC has been overrun by boring yuppies.

What of the cops who ARE like american psycho? They're not as rare as you'd think.

Oh yeah, absolutely? Remember NARC, that video games by Williams? You played the role of an armored and close-face-helmeted narcotics officer equipped with some kind of M16 derivative assault rifle (maybe a commando since it had full auto) and an attached grenade launcher. And essentially you walked through the streets blowing away drug users. It was one of the first 8 bit games that ever had comic but disturbing violence because if you lit someone up with a grenade they usually would go flying. In some levels you got to ride a red sports car and dodge obstacles while running over drug users. Seriously.

I remember on one level the enemy was some kind of clown on speed or PCP or something and he'd run up and try to punch you. Acting as a law enforcement officer reacting to a clown trying to punch you you'd need to empty a whole lot of 5.56 ammo into him to actually kill him. Alternately, you could bean him with a launch grenade and something violent and comical which I forget would happen.

Yeah, that was one hell of a disturbing game. I found it to be more disturbing than Mortal Kombat because it was essentially propaganda directed at young kids which glorified (literally) opening up with an assault rifle on a bunch of druggie hoboes who stagger around the city in open brown overcoats.

Max Force and Hit Man were the names of the cops in NARC. No, they aren't nicknames. Those are their actual given names.
What kind of parents name their kid Hit Man?


80s children's entertainment does tend towards simplifed yet surrealistic violence. There are no moral quandries, there are just good guys and buy guys. The good guys are, of course, justified in stopping the bad guys using deadly force. Likewise, the bad guys don't have motives. They do what they do just because they are bad guys.
Look at Cobra and The Decpticons. The former is a caricature of a highly funded terrorist organization. They have the equipment and manpower to rival NATO and are bent of world domination just because. The footsoldiers are highly idealistic and idealogical but they have no ideals or ideology because if they didn't then they wouldn't be terrorists but if they did then they might be sympathetic. The Decepticons, on the other hand, are both the victims and the perpetrators of an age-old ethnic conflict. The Autobots paint the Decepticon ethnicity as innately 'evil', as does the canon material. Because the Decepticons are evil ethnic cleansing is acceptable. But when Megatron tries to steal some electricity so his people won't die a slow death from starvation he is somehow in the wrong.

Terrorist organisations with the power of a government is screwy anyway, one odd thing about the original Command and Conquer with NOD.

Man, you guys make me want to start a thread just on the 80's. I love hearing about all this stuff. I was born in 1980, so a lot of it I really don't remember. BTW, WR and hyzmarca, if either of you guys pass through the DC area, PLEASE drop me a line, I'd love to buy you both multiple beers in exchange for extreme 80's knowledge.

When you were born is not necessarily a clear indication of how knowledgeable you are. I know many people of my age range and older whose knowledge of the eighties would make you cry.

Not because it's extensive, either.

~J

Ditto Here, MFB. That was am intense episode. I thought I was the only one to notice that the Kids shows are more crap today. I used to enjoy Batman the Animated series and the X-men from the early nineties, and I just caught one of the more recent ones and they are garbage. No good new Transformers either.

Aside, I think the split between the Autobots and the Decepticons was ideological, not ethnic.

The Dreamwave G1 comic presented it as idealogical. Everything else presented it as ethnic.
In the Marvel comic the Decepticon race was split from the Autobots to keep some sort of mystical good/evil balance. Since the Autobots are all good the Decepticons are all evil. The cartoon had a slightly more realistic depiction. When the Quintisons were mass producing the Transformers' ancestors they divided them into two catagories, domestic slaves and war machine. The Autobots evolved from the naturally docile domestic slaves and the Decepticons from the war machines. Ironicly, it was the Autobots that started the first Great War against the Quintessons.
Best wars expends upon this by presenting a post GWII Cybertron that is strongly divided along ethnic lines in which the decendants of the Decepticons have what passes as an independent government but are basically second class citizens, not unlike the Palestinians in relation to Israel. Of course, we never actually see much of Cybertron in Beast Wars but the ethnic hatred is apparent as the Rattrap tends to make comments to the effect that the only good Predacon is a dead Predacon, a sentiment that seems to be common amongst the Maximals of Cybertron at the time.
Ironically, the racism of certain heroic characters in Beast Wars is far more in your face and realistically done than racism in Shadowrun, mostly due to the history of violent ethnic conflict and the fact that the current war is drawn along ethnic lines. This is obvious in the odd love/hate friendship between Rattrap and Dinobot. Whereas Rattrap hates and fears the defector because of his ethnicity and Dinobot's dislikes Rattrap because of his outspoken racist views, they do come to love and respect one another and friends and comrades; Rattrap takes Dinobot's death harder than any other character but this friendship doesn't change his views. He continues to be an outspoken racist throughout the show and he opposes Blackaracnia's defection in spite of her Maximal heritage. Likewise, the young Cheetor carelessly throws out ethnic slurs during battle without fully understanding what they mean.

You know I always think of Cops in Shadowrun in terms of Dark Blue with Kurt Russel.

"I don't have a gun officer dont shoot."

"Yeah you do!" (Throws plant gun at crook.)" Blam Blam Blam.

"Assailant down. Tried to fire on me."

Out in the lawless neighborhoods I would'nt expect them to even try to follow the book. Crime in SR is probably an epic unstopable problem in the Big Citys. Like our forever War on Terrorism. That has to eat on the Police force in a way, making them uncaring, brutal, and corrupt to varying degrees. They'd be more concerned with keeping statis quo and making a little profit. I mean if we are talking about a dystopian future. I'm sure some aren't that bad but still...

hmm, quite the interpetation of transformers here...

Dark Blue is a good one, Training Day is another. 16 Blocks I could see, as well.