When people complain that Technomncers are overpowered, I bring up the social aspect.

Technomancers are hated and feared, Matrix boogeymen, to most people. There is a very real possibility that, if a bunch of people find out that a neighbor is a Technomancer, that neighbor would find himself dangling from a light post.

In talking with other people, we've been having discussions about how extensive this sort of prejudice and fear goes. It's been brought up that it's hard to pick out Technomancers, but with the activity of anti-Technomancer groups and Technomancer-sniffing dogs (Running Wild), it seems like it would be much easier to find them.

What do you think? How much risk do you think the average Technomancer faces?

Straight off, it's a major mistake to compare a hidden, new, and special power to an obvious physical racial feature that had already garnered discrimination for centuries.

The actual question is, of course, a good one. I think it depends on the microculture, for one. In a corp arcology, I gather there's plenty of propaganda. In the shadows, you get a funky mix of blanket paranoia, various bigotry, and a certain measure of only caring about the job. I think being a technomancer is more like the threat of communist spies, or, more poignantly, witches. I bet people have a certain 'urban legendry' about how to tell a Technomancer (they weigh the same as a duck, for one). They tend to be young (or at least, they used to?), so it's a convenient excuse to attack those damn kids and their make-out parties.

Xahn's right, all the standard Humanis tricks can also get involved: protect yourself/your community/your country/humanity, they're unnatural/wrong/impure, they're dangerous, etc.

Depends on the environment. Seattle tends to be ahead of the times, I think, so you wouldn't encounter lynch mobs every other day. Those that go after the Awakened and metahumans don't tend fall under this category though. Humanis would probably have a massive hate-on for virtuakinetics.

Nearly nothing at all, i guess...

They can't be identified, except if they have the bionode "on" (most of the time) and some hacker of other technomancer feels them. And the people who do know are pretty much a bunch of social outcasts, freaks and horrible monsters themselves.

If people witness you having control over machines and knowing stuff you aren't supposed to know... you can alsways say: "Eh, i just logged into the WWW from my internal comlink"

In my old SR3 group we had an Otaku who very successfully used his "Cyberdeck" - effectively just a dummy filled with memory banks and a router for him to go online. Only one of his crew knew and didn't care.


While a few people might have trust-issues with a technomancer in his team i guess it would hit mages harder (they CAN and will control you - or read your mind... and can find you wherever if you have a conflict)

Instead of using the Black in the 40's which is immediately identifiable, I'd go with the HIV in the 80's line. No one could tell at first glance if a person had it, but once identified it could ruin a person's life. The problem is hysteria, lack of information, and a large amount of disinformation. There are havens for Technomancers, especially in the shadows, but they are few and far between.

By the end of the Emergence plotline though, many of the active and visible hunts have stopped. Now, there are laws requiring mandatory registration in some jurisdictions. Just like Awakened people, the registered technomancers will be monitored and if they put a toe out of line with their abilities, they can expect law enforcement at their doorstep waiting.

The average technomancer probably picks and chooses who she tells about her true nature, because that information can be used against her later if she isn't careful. Beyond that, the TM-sniffing dogs aren't going to be out in the street, they will guard high security areas. A technomancer could live a 9-5 life in a lower lifestyle without ever being tested for ability.

Remember that mis- and disinformation will be common. "A technomancer? Don't hack my brain, man!" There could be all sorts of unjustifiable prejudice around.

That's a good point: all the Awakened have basically paved the way for rare people among you with secret powers. And they might also face the same lingering prejudice of the Awakened; what's a mundane care if your 'screw with reality' stat is Magic or Resonance?

And there'll also be the ones who think you can be 'taught' how to do it. For Awakened and Emerged.

I wasnt strictly doing so, just comparing the dangers.

Blacks were the boogeymen of that era, blamed for everything that went wrong when people were too shortsighted to look for a genuine cause. Marijuana was made illegal because people thought it made blacks more restless and more prone to violence.

Sure. But I think it's best to avoid the comparison altogether, both because it's so fraught, and for the many key differences. We've offered some others that seem more apt. The aspect of 'secretly living among us' is vital, I think.

It's the 2070s, and people are still scared of magicians stealing their soul and quoting that mistranslation about "Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live" and all that...

Technomancers are just the new nig... Huh? Oh, I've been informed I can't use the "N" word as I'm a white guy from Northern Ontario. Even if “The Irish are the niggers of Europe”, and I'm Half-Irish.

What do you call racial discrimination against idiots?

Wow.

I still really want to reiterate that this comparison doesn't make sense. Technomancers are not a long-and-historically downtrodden ethnic group. They're a new, covert, and non-cultural phenomenon within all existing populations, classes, and groups. (Although, they can certainly join together and express a subculture.) They are witches… except unlike the Awakened, their powers are 'don't need a cell phone'. Pretty lame and nonthreatening, really, but that's what corp propaganda is for.

"A valid reason for a beatdown."?


My name is Karl Brackhaven, and I approve this burning Technomancer.

Even the dogs can't detect a technomancer unless he is using resonance at the time.

As for the anti-technomancer groups, you can have all the seismographs in the world set to searching for rainstorms, but they'll never return results unless a raindrop falls on one. That is to say, with no way to tell a technomancer from anyone else, these groups are just throwing accusation around aimlessly, and most likely falsely.

Doesn't mean nothing will happen to those they accuse. Just look at JoeyD. Even if she wasn't a technomancer, the simple existence of the evidence was enough to get her to drop out of the Seattle governer race in 2070.

That only makes them more dangerous.

… And why are you 'searching for rainstorms', and why with *seismographs*?

Apparently you can assense whether someone is a technomancer with 5+ hits.

Because seismographs have no way to detect rainstorms.
I like analogies.

Oh, that makes (slightly) more sense. That analogy is horrible. If you like them, why do you mistreat them so?

Reminds me of the "red scare" Communist witchhunts in the 50s and 60s.

The no-good, lying, pinko commies could be anyone and anywhere! Your neighbor! Your schoolmates! Your colleagues! Your family! Even YOU!

ARE YOU A STINKING COMMUNIST? ARE YOU? HUH?




-k

That presumes the acceptance of the Awakened, though. I don't think the Caliphate is likely to be any more thrilled about technomancers than they are about the practice of magic. On a similar note, in a homebrew Minneapolis game, partly due to PC actions, it was Minneapolis' Islamic community in Cedar-Riverside that was at the forefront of the anti-techno movement (had an NIJ-aligned gunslinger who had strong opinions on the matter and got her community and Renraku talking to each other...)

The idea that the guy standing next to you could, without any equipment, hack into your commlink, wreck your digital life and you'd have (basically) no way to counter him seems pretty scary to me.

From a metagaming aspect, once you've sunk some Karma into a Technomancer, they can bootstrap a gear hacker quite handily. Putting that into game world terms, your average person would be basically powerless to stop a Technomancer, not least of the reasons being that 99.98% of the population cant tell who Technomancers are.

Vague threats that you cant see or detect are MUCH scarier to people than definable and obvious threats.

There is a major differance between awakened and Technomancer.
Mages do have helpfull skills for Joe avarage.
They make your wounds heal faster, they help you fight off this sickness etc. etc.
(Since the Shadowrun rules are very vage on how stuff works, it is hard to tell how big the benefits in the medical sector are)

But not only there. Every rescue Operation benefits extremly from the use of Elementals. Etc. etc.

Technomancers have manly the ability to manipulate data. AKA steal from other persons.
For shadowrunner thats no big deal. But for joe avarage...
Yeah, mages should face severe restriction like people who carry guns and explosives. But still theire skill can be benefitial in reality.

How pro awakend groups stand to technomancers would strongly depend on the group. The more mystical they are I guess the more they would dislike technomancers.
(They are after all a thread to their representation in public two, because people would maybe not distinguish between mage and mancer.)

Megu, I actually specifically addressed the non-acceptance of Awakened.

Socinus, I know, but it's still *lame*, in a world that already has super hackers. They're just a slightly different version of those.

Well, those super hackers are mostly due to some RAW "cheat". That has nothing to do with the world.
I mean health care with the O-cells would be crazy cheap. No sick people anymore.

I don't know the fluff very well, but I thought the various canon hacker are *better* than PCs, munchkin or not.

I always assumed they were good enough to build their own milspec hardware.

I hate the red scare analogy, Karma, for two reasons:

Ol' Joe was right about a lot of the people in government that he accused, this is usually downplayed because it isn't PC to go after someone who espouses big government as the answer, and for the second part you can figure out alot about someone's politics through observation of behavior and association. The same doesn't hold true of technomancers, they can hide in plain sight as hackers with a very limited amount of work to it and with the state of understanding how they function there are not truly reliable methods of detecting them. A lot of people are going to bring up emerged critters but to that I would point out the real world studies showing exactly how unreliable drug and bomb sniffing dogs can be in the presence of cues from a handler who does not have the proper training, and how rare that training would be in this case. The most reliable method would in fact be astrally percieving metas or sapients and even then the problem is finding ones with enough skill and making sure they know what they are seeing.

Which would just be the type of thing that marketing departments would use to crank up the fear in order to sell products to "Help Protect" against Technomancer Attacks.

Notice the important word "Help", there. No guarantee.

I wonder how much a technomancer could reduce these effects, by 'reassuring' the paranoid and prejudiced that they're 'one of the nice ones'. If they had sold out and come out as a technomancer, could they try and avoid this sort of response? "Look, I'm not a hacker, I work for [corp] same as you!"

Never dealt much with fear and prejudice, have you?

The *real* scary reds wouldn't make the mistake of leaving clues, though. I like the witch comparison better, but of course any analogy is not intended to be extended too far.

It's certainly true that finding a technomancer is very difficult, more so than really any historical example can give us. They're not black, they're not activists, they're not terrorists (swarthy, mountain-man, eco, or otherwise), and they're not even Awakened. But they *are* feared, and the subject of both corp propaganda and corp interest, right? So they'd have to intentionally hide (in plain sight, or not). They don't want to be suspiciously-good hackers, and obviously never brag about their power. They'd probably have secret Resonance contacts/communities as their only trusted compatriots?

I'm also really naive about it too!

Well, he was right in that a lot of people did have a short flirt with communism during the Depression. On the other hand, the idea that all those people not just continued to be communists, rather than chalking it up s juvenile weirdness, but even formed a vast network to infiltrate and undermine the US...

But you are right that it makes a poor comparison, since there never was a point in time when it was OK to associate with technomancers.


As to how people would react, I'd guess as with any unpopular minority group. They want to take over the place, seduce our women, corrupt our children, yadda yadda. If you heard anything different, that's jsut some techno-Taqiyya, or whitewashing from their buddies in the media and politics.
And the fact that technos cannot easily be detected should only make it worse, doesn't that prove they have something to hide?

Not that there's anything wrong with being a communist in the first place.

You know that Seattle is now governed by a guy who has ties to Humanis and advocates ork apartheit, right?



That must be why the first reaction to every new phenomenon in the 6th world, whether it's mages, metahumans, changelings or technomancers, is "let's form a mob with torches and pitchforks and kill it".

Something tells me we're only seeing the tip of Karl. Being beaten out to a Dragon has probably warped him far more than people realize.

As for the lynch mobs, hell, it's the Former USA. A limp and hunchback is reason enough for a good ol' fashioned lynchin'! Back Hump optional. (And this is where the folks in the USA shoot me. A lot.).

Indeed...

Back on topic, bloody idiocy isn't going out of style any time soon.

Always remember the two most common things in the universe: Hydrogen and Stupidity, and Stupidity is Winning!

I already addressed that, Rasumichin. People 'know how' to react to weird new powers, even though it's not a *good* way.

Since it seems to be on-topic, I could use a hand from dumpshock's collective snarking powers: What are some good, stereotypical, misinformed anti-technomancer propoganda lines? The kind of crap you're likely to hear on the news, or general TM fearmongering, or even humanis' take on it.

"They could be anyone!"
"They can hack your brain!"
"I heard they're trying to bring back deus"

That kind of stuff. Its for a game I'm joining.

Go for a mix of Glenn Beck *and* more 'reasonable' things. So, 'they're mind-controlling everyone', but also, 'they're dangerous matrix terrorists'. That one-two punch of crazy-lies and normal-lies has proven very effective.

The worry that they're the Second Coming of Dues is what has a lot of folks in the know scared.

And seems to be the basis for a lot of Clockwork's paranoia against them.

Yeah, but Clockwork is a few Springs short of a Movement anyways...

He'd be dangerous if he was more charismatic!

...

Actually, considering how mercenary he is, if he was charismatic, he'd probably set up an Anti-Technomancer version of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Clockwork seems to me likte the sort that would self-destruct on power trips long before he was really dangerous in a large scale way to me. That might be because he is after all a shadowrunner though...

Heh...

I still think it'd be interesting to explore the possibility that Deus was really trying to prepare humanity for the coming of the Horrors.






-k

How K? By impersonating them?