OK I'm one of the voices, howling in the wilderness, against 4th ed but I have said that I liked the decking stuff.

I was ,finally, reading through unwired and was really worried by the hwole entertainment thing. People can live virtual lives, even a wired family all sitting around in a living room all watching differnet forms of entertainment completely oblivious to their fellows around them. In theory many office workers living in the protections of an archology could 'log on' to work while on their way. So how long until the corpers start to atrophy? I know the corps would love this-no need to go out, stay home and use corp approved entertainment, why go lcubbing in the meat body when you can do it in cyber and appear without the beer gut or in tres chic clothes you don't have to worry about staining/malfunctioning? Kid's no good at sports in the gym, well he doesn't need to wrok out harderrt, he just goes virtual and plays great.

The idea of the educated part of meta humanity becoming more and more ...flabby while the SINlesshave to be physical? Anyone else ever read The Time Machine?

meh, with implant muscles, you dont need to exercise to stay fit.

i would hazard that bone lacing, muscle replacement/augmentation and similar tech would be comparable to liposuction and similar today...

and have it not always been this way?

This can happen now, try this for a not-unrealistic example

08:30 Get up, shower, coffee, breakfast
09:00 Go to computer in home office, login to work, go through emails, actioning replies and work as normal.
12:00 Microwave lunch, watch TV for 20 minutes
12:30 Back to work
17:00 Decide to put in a few hours of work overtime, still all at home.
18:50 Log off work, go microwave dinner
19:30 log in to WoW, open up social network sites
00:00 Finish raiding in wow, end conversations with friends, go to bed

It's entirely possible for someone to have a near-total online social and work life today. I've met couples who spend more time talking to one another (during the week) on ventrilo/teamspeak while playing an MMO than they do face to face. I don't think it's terribly healthy but it's happening.

I kinda doubt it is a concern. I'm sure all those arcologies have gyms.

Wow, been a rash of posts lately that just make me want to reply with one sentence:

It's a dystopia.


So if you're perturbed by the implications, that's a good thing. It might have lost more and more of it every time it gets a new edition, but Shadowrun is not supposed to be a fairyland of rainbow colored unicorns. It's supposed to point out the negative in what is, what could be, etc. It's supposed to emphasize things that make you uncomfortable.

And yeah, there are some folks out there that are looking forward to exactly what you describe. And as Evilref illustrated, it's not that uncommon today, what you're describing. Not every part of a dystopic viewpoint is going to be negative to everyone, but by damn, something in there should be, or they've lost half of the point in writing the game world.

Huh, and here I thought the wireless implications would be an improvement over decking when it comes to being physically mobile. Heck, in fact, why wouldn't this make it so that the cubicle goes bye bye and in stead the wage slaves now do their work from the corp approved commlinks and AR programs while either doing laps together and sitting on a bench when they need to? Think of the costs the corp would save, improved health would limit the drain on their health benefits, not having to pay for desks/cubicle walls/terminals - heck, why even outfit a room at all other than the wireless stuff? I hope you are following me on how this might improve a corps bottom line by lowering costs by going wireless and AR. VR would probably still require a certain level of sit down enviroment though, but how often does the average corp person actually need to go VR unless its their area of technical expertise? And even then, unless security required it, why not off load that cost to the wage slave, have them just VR from home in their bed, couch or recliner?

I hope I am not too far off in thinking this, my understanding of SR4A AR/VR is very limited in experience.

50 years from now, in an age where machine intelligences are viable there won't be any jobs for wageslaves.

A single machine is more efficient and much cheaper than 50 staff.

Anyone trying to justify wageslaves is just trying to maintain 20th century officelife.

and that could make things very interesting, depending on what way the economy ends up swinging...

btw, i swear i read a novel of some kind online about such a scenario, but i cant find it...

But machine intelligences are harder to manipulate and control than real-life meat wageslaves. You can't effectively beat the AI if it tells you to go fuck off. It doesn't really need anything you've got, and once it goes sentient it has its own priorities that might not coincide with yours.

I though the whole point of having wageslaves was to have office jobs done cheaply.
Obviously your definition of office job is very different.
Hiring a room full of people, just so you can shout at them and abuse them, and you're thinking that's an office, says something about the offices you've worked in.
Most office work does not take much in the way of brainpower to accomplish, so easily achievable with even moderately powerful fuzzylogic smart machines.

Tom Peters [business guru, among other things] thinks that most office jobs will be replaced by software within 10 years.

question is, will the cost of getting and maintaining the hardware and software be lower then just hiring some people at minimum wage?

When the corps run everything, there is no minimum wage. If one machine can do the work of 50 people, but each person works for less than 1/50th of the machine's cost, then people working is what you have.

minimum wage being the resources need to keep them living and doing the job they are needed for, not the current concept of law mandated minimum...

sorry that i was unclear, i sometimes jump a couple of steps in the thought chain...

Answer: Not all things at present can be handled by a compuuter. Now throw in the expert systems and AI's and any machinist/mechanic/technical job is at risk. However, an AI will have trouble relating to Flesh people and while it can handle the report creation, it will not have the depth of understanding to deal with human emotion. From this perspective, wage slaves will be needed to present the report and deal with the client.

heh, the AI sounds like your stereotypical IT department

"I take the specs, and give them to the programmers!"

"Well let me ask you this; why can't the clients, give the specs directly to the programmers?"

"Because programmers aren't good with people! I have people skills! Don't you see"

I love that movie.

Remember that in SR, programs are getting better and better at interacting with a person emotionally. If you don't believe it from the Virtual Companions, think about emoti-toys. They may well be able to be better at reading people than people are. Of course, "little" incidents like the Renraku Arcology will probably scale back whole sale replacing of meat workers with programs for a while with SR.

But there's certainly no reason that the corp can't down size a families living spaces within the arcology to 1/3 the size, the issue them a subscription service to virtual housing enviroments and entertainments (automatically debited from their salary of course). Make simple soy crap food reminiscent of The Matrix taste like New York Strip Steak with the right program added (again, for only a small fee), and you cut down considerably on the "human cost".

I'm not entirely sure how this is unique to SR4. We've had cube farms for decades. We've had mainstream desktop computers nearly as long. Television has been around longer than even that. Telephones, have been common for nearly a century.

Sedantarism has been an official problem for the past decade.

I've seen families at restaurants where the children were playing handheld games or listening to music, the adults reading newspapers or playing with their smartphones, all totally ignoring each other. If they do that in a restaurant, think what the home life must be like. Our real world society is already at the place you claim to fear and you're worried that a group of game developers are taking a *fictional* dystopia in that direction? /boggle

Things are getting weird when people are dissing 4th edition because it makes use of the implications of a wireless society we pretty much already have right now.

p.s. There's a treatment under development that turns off the protein responsible for muscle atrophy. If a drug like that is under development in 2009, no one and I mean *no one* of Middle Lifestyle or higher in the Shadowrun world of 2072 is fat or weak unless they want to be. Many of the technological aspects of the SR setting are more like 2030 than 2070, but I forgive them because they have a game to balance and they're also not prescient.

I also see it like SR 2070 has had all these set backs to their tech thanks to having to dedicate resources to dealing with disaster after disaster on like a Katrina scale. Who knows how many scientist, technicians, inventors, etc have been smoldering in their graves thanks to violence, magic, disease, or malnutrition who would have been the ones giving up the goods. I mean, how many technological marvels come out of the dystopian hot spots of our current world, other than new cheap and devious ways to kill each other?

And in some ways, I have noticed the opposite with regards to the teched out family, thanks to things like being a facebook friend with your mom, they are more likely to know what is going on in their kid's lives than ever before without even having to sneak into their bedroom, strip search it, and read their diary. It is easier than ever to track (and who knows, even actually be involved with) your children in cyberspace and meatspace.

This doesn't have anything to do with my personal work environment, but with the fluff. The dystopian theme of SR seems to push the idea that life is cheap and people are downtrodden. There is no minimum wage. No unions. No worker's rights. The Corps don't believe in a healthy work-life balance. They can demand a 100-hour a week schedule and get it while only paying the wage slaves a subsistence stipend in their Corp script which the employees are forced to spend in the company store. [Non-managerial] Employees who get too old and feeble to stay productive often 'volunteer' for special programs [lab rats] or are moved to retirement homes which are even more austere [though their families may continue to get fake letters from the company talking about how happy they are].

Employees generally don't resist because they've been indoctrinated from birth, because they're convinced that exile to the Barrens equals death for both them and their families, and because any attempts to cause trouble result in them mysteriously disappearing. Access to the real world outside of company housing is restricted to management. An AI generally won't have these controls on its behavior. It's got no family to hold hostage. The company can't be sure of the AI's loyalty or continued work ethic. Attempts to program loyalty or obedience into the AI aren't always successful and sometimes cause them to go insane (hello Deus!).

I absolutely agree that there are some jobs that unintelligent algorythms would handle more effectively than people. But the more intelligent they make the AI the less control they'll have over it, and the Corps are all about control.

[edit] Not all people would be in this situation. Only the Megacorps have the resources to create a self-contained SCIRE or Arcology. But the people inside that world don't know what the alternatives are.

We're going to get down to quibbling pretty quickly on this topic but I'll just say that many of the technological developments of the last half-century or so are the work of a tiny proportion of the general population of the so-called advanced industrial societies. My viewpoint on the subject is that the many catastrophes of the SR timeline make it very hard for governments to provide a safety net for all their citizens, which is exemplified by the large numbers of SINless and generally high poverty rates in the SR setting. On the other hand, if the world economy does not tank completely, which by the SR fluff it hasn't despite all the disasters, corporate R&D is going to chug away. I know this is a generalization, but I think that while the impacts of the SR timeline are certainly felt, it wouldn't slow the pace of technological advancement as much as you seem to think it would. All very much IMO, obviously.

Wouldn't most corporations in 2050-2070+, having liberally borrowed the idea from Japanese corps, instituted a physical exercise program for their employees? I fugured this was a given in most Corporate structures by then.

No, they just make the acceptance of certain "medi-chines" injected into your bloodstream mandatory in the employment contract. These medi-chines keep you fit and productive, eliminating the need for wasteful exercise periods.

Okay, I know that's a little further out than the canon SR tech level, but they'd do it, wouldn't they?

think of it as cattle, and one gets all kinds of ideas...

...

I've been told that gymnastic was one of the tool for the creation of national identity in some countries (such as Danemark). So I'm not sure that the ideas behind physical exercises are just to have fit employees (even if that's already a good thing for the corp).

It's not. Group exercises are just that: group exercises. It's meant to cut down on individuality and competitiveness and foster a collective identity. I'm not sure you've ever seen one of those in action, but everyone moves at the same pace (or at least, they're supposed to); if you move too fast, you look impatient to everyone else and thus slow yourself down, if you move too slow, you're holding everyone back and thus try to catch up.

And to the OP, the problems that you've listed...they're happening now. There've been numerous books (those things that are in bookstores, somewhere behind the tons and tons of DVDs, music CDs, audiobooks, and e-readers) written on the subject of what modern multimedia is doing to our thinking processes, attention spans, and values. For starters, go pick up "The Dumbest Generation" or maybe "The Age of American Unreason."

As it has been pointed out, the corps don't really want a happy and healthy workforce using their wireless 'links to work while seeing the world, they want a depressed, downtroddened, and fairly sickly workforce that they can grossly over charge for third world style medical care and who more importantly, are simply too numb to get ideas about changing the world.

Remember, although the corps love profits, they are willing to run in the red for the one thing that they love even more, control.

Yes and no.

Yes - in case of phisical laborers. No need to make them happy; they are expendable. But some corps could think that increasing loyality of "little troll workers" may be profitable, and give them a bit better terms than competition.
Of course, phisical laborers don't need additional exercises.

Not at all - if we mean white-collars. If they are depressed, their effectivness goes down. So a bit better working terms, medical care etc. are profitable. And stress will be directed in a profitable way (read: rat race).

Without phisical activeness, people are less concentrated, more depressed and more often ill. Corps want good, concentrated and sharp-minded workers to make good programs, good marketing, good PR etc. Group exercises are relatively cheap - why not?

I disagree, because although they would like to be able to have healthy and happy workers for the reasons you gave the reasons that they don't want healthy and happy workers outweighs the benefits.

Tis Cyberpunk, "quality" no longer exists except at the extreme top end, and not always there either.

Well, it depends what kind of game style You prefer .
I think corps will do at least some things for wage slaves. I mean security (two dozen cops can watch a whole neighborhood), medical care (they don't need full-blown clinic; just something better than public hospital), school for their children (read: investment in future wage slaves). If corps would tread employees like a trash, and then one corp would give them a bit better terms... zombies from other corps would blow up own firms from inside, just to get a job in the "good" corporation.
That's a trick: corps give wage slaves relatively cheap necessities and comforts, and in exchange has a bit of loyality. Workers feel and see that corporation "cares" for them, and are less willing to escape, spying for competition, help runners... Of course all this "goods" are as cheap as possible. And more important workers get better terms. All this is a part of indoctrination process.

Back to the gym problem: I don't think it would be really hard or expensive to make many of wage slaves do some exercises. Only building some sports fields and gym rooms in enclaves and arcologies would be a major cost. But AR gym instructors? Sport guides in public library? Martial arts teachers (AR or flesh)? No problem.

Just look at the Popularity of the Wii Gaming Console today... Wii Fitness anyone?

link it into the office network, and have a "best of" after some period...

just look at all the "reality" shows about loosing weight and so on...

They've gone the Wii one better in Shadowrun... you play Killing Floor by running around outside. You have to meet and interact with strangers if you want to win.

Hehe. Wasn't there something about a bunch of 'Miracle Shooter' AR players getting killed because they jumped in front of moving vehicles and off of roofs while dodging imaginary fire?

Where was that?

SR4, under gear, specifically AR software...

There are also corp-owned professional sport teams promoting sport, probably soccer/baseball/basketball/other teams for children (in corp-owned schools) - OK, I don't believe in children Urban Brawl teams...
And sport mean also demand for equipment, clothing, nutrients... "So, most our workers can't buy regular cosmetic surgery, muscle replacement or juwenalization... but we can sell them Muscle Power-Builder™ powder, dumb-bells, steppers, Urban Explorer Jumpsuits, and still get back a bit of their wage! And we give them sense of co-working (group exercises), upgrade sense of corporate "tradition" (healthy, strong Americans in Ares; tradition of martial arts in japanacorps). And this way we bound them with corporation even MORE.

heh, this whole thread reminds me of how wacky the economics thinking of SR must be...

Which is why I hand-wave away the most extreme corporate dystopia from my version of the SR world. The corporations are going to do whatever increases shareholder value. If that means keeping your knowledge workers happy enough to be creative, then that's just part of the cost of doing business and maintaining an edge over your rivals. This doesn't mean the corporations are altruistic, it just means that the shareholders' best interests will sometimes line up with treating the employees decently. In situations where the workers can be productive without being happy, i.e. simple repetitive assembly tasks, then I am totally on board with the employees being treated little better than animals. All depends on the situation, IMO.

well the thing is that i have a hard time finding out how the corps are making a profit, unless there is a large percentage of independently wealthy sinners that we never hear about.

their workers are going to be payed/given as much as they need to survive, unless they are seen as highly important to maintaining the corp edge, but that will be a zero sum game.

so who is buying the goods and services that brings in the profits?

Because the "corps" aren't really companies in the modern sense, they are more akin to fedual kingdoms of the Dark Ages.

a economic aristocracy? i guess it could make sense...

especially if each AAA corp runs its own bank(s), with a bit of lending from the big bank in the sky...

That's a pretty sweeping statement. Are there no markets? Are there no shareholders? Do they not provide goods and services in exchange for currency?

Could you please elaborate?

The answer to your question is yes, but in name only. The markets are designed by the corps, for the corps, the only "real" shareholders are amongst the ultra rich, and the services and goods are usually low end crap akin to the cheap plastic toys you can get out of vending manchines today.

All in all, tis the Dark Ages all over again with a new coat of paint, and even that paint is faded and falling off in ragged chucks.

Are you are saying that the Shadowrun world is governed by a totalitarian communist-style planned economy? If the markets are "designed" then they are planned. This would seem to imply that the AAA's are all in cahoots in designing the market. If that's true, why are they hiring shadowrunners to steal/sabotage/etc. their rivals' latest product/research/etc.? If there is no real capitalist market with consumers that have choice, why are people inundated with AR advertisements for the latest and greatest products?

Everything that follows has a large YMMV sign posted on it:

I like to picture my SR dystopia as plutocracy and laissez-faire capitalism taken to an extreme. The system is rigged, but it's essentially an extremely corrupt form of capitalism rather than a totalitarian corporate state. I find trends in our current economic system scary enough that I all I have to do is project them forward in an exaggerated (I hope) manner and *poof* , instant dystopia.

As a side note on the "cheap plastic toys" theory of Shadowrun consumer goods. Over the last twenty years the standard of living for the lower two quartiles in the U.S. has climbed even as the gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else has soared. The advent of cheaply made consumer goods has meant that low income families can afford things that would have been considered luxuries forty years ago. Now project that trend forward into the Shadowrun timeline where you've got another several decades worth of technological advancement in materials science, fabrication methods and product design. For next to nothing, corporations can provide their employees with consumer goods and entertainment options that would seem, to us, like magical luxuries. The dystopia here isn't that life is *materially* bleak for everyone or that they're all living in Orwell's 1984. That's too obvious. The tragedy and dystopia is that the bulk of the population is so comfortable and mesmerized by entertainment that they don't pay any attention to the significant minority of the population whose lives really are materially bleak (the sinless population in the Barrens, etc.) and the tiny slice of the fabulously wealthy who are the primary beneficiaries of the system.

Edit: Which, upon reflection, ties back into the OP since what I'm describing as my pictured dystopia has all the elements the OP was worried about. So to the OP I say, "Don't worry, embrace the dystopia."

Don't have much time, but my quick off the cuff reply is no the corps aren't communist, there're fedual. And the only thing that they are "in cahoots" over is maknig sure that the "little guy" has not chance in hell of ever getting out from under their thumb. On everything else they are in a neverending cold war over, hence the need for Shadowrunners.


And remember, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk in general are children of the Eighties, so Eighties style dystopia is what should be the default.

....Which raises the excellent question of "How many current Shadowrun players were even out of kindergarten by 1989?"

I hesitate to go all Wiki on you, but: The social and economic system which characterized most European societies in the Middle Ages goes by the name of feudalism. The system, in its most basic essence, is the granting of land in return for military service.

I think you are using the "static social structure" that you see in both feudalism and SR society and using that one similarity to label SR's global economic system as "feudal." Maybe what you're looking for is Corporatocracy or Oligarchy. Feudalism doesn't seem like a good label to describe the economics of SR.



Totally IMO, previous editions of SR were children of the Eighties, as am I. However, one of the things I like best about SR4 is that it lets the setting shed some of those dated trappings and project forward from a more contemporary viewpoint. Now, if a big part of the draw for you is the 80's style dystopia then I'm not going to tell you to change your vision.

I graduated from high school in 1989. I think the posters on DS skew older, but I have no idea what the mean age of SR players is.

I don't know if this will help any as I am a newcomer to SR (I only have the 4 and 4A books) but I graduated in 2001.

As far as the economics of SR4A 2072 go, I see it a lot like the world of today only the "free" market has been allowed to run wild, you know, sorta like the latest depression. Say, wasn't there a dip in the market in the 70s/80s after a bunch of deregulation too? Rich get richer, poor get poorer, regulation of the system goes bye-bye, crashes become more and more frequent but periods of insane profits happen too and so on and so on. The biggest things in SR verse that seems to have not contributed to social-economic change appears to be resource shortages and climate change, which between the VITAS reducing world population significantly and magic restoring some of nature's dominance on climate change seem to be what prevented those end/change games. SR even screwed with religious dogma dominance too, didn't it? SRs wars probably contributed too.

I kinda see it like the world has had its economic complete collapse clock reset back to the days of just when the Train Barons started to get going, only now those lines go completely around the World. say in a Wide Web. The world balkanized but not at the same time.