#cyber/gen x corporate

[blockygraphics]

Various BMP files representing scenes from the CD for the German game Virtual Corporation (1996). According to MobyGames the 3D animators were Alberto Morales, Adrian Williams, and Peter Vlahakis, with additional graphics by Martin Dolgener.

Intro to the game (translated from German):

"The year is 2028.

All trade and business transactions are conducted on the NET, an evolution of the Internet from the 1990s.

Access to the NET is via Brainstorm TM, a user interface developed by Google Plex Industries in collaboration with governments around the world. Brainstorm transmits audio and visual inputs directly into the user's brain while complying with legal regulations.

Chris Qwerty, a promising young programmer at Pogodyne Systems, Google Plex's main competitor, developed the concept of virtual teleconferencing. This revolutionized the way companies around the world did business and a global cybercity developed on the NET.

Pogodyne became the most successful and powerful software company in the world.

And then suddenly a job opened up..."

[thisisrealy2kok]

Might not be in the Y2k aesthetic, but where else are you gonna post 90s Linux vs Microsoft desktop wallpaper?

[galle-runo]

[slimepunkaesthetic]

WACKY POMO

(Short for Wacky Postmodern) - That 'wacky kidz' marketing aesthetic prominent from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, an amalgam of exaggerated, askew forms & motifs pulled from Googie, Deconstructivism, Pacific Punk Wave, Memphis Milano, 1940s-60s comics, cartoons & kids marketing, Willy Wonka-esque Victorian whimsical eccentricism (including 'Mad Scientist tropes), cartoonified industrial vernacular, and light gross-out kids' humor (goo, ooze). Typically bright, loud, acid-toned colors similar to the 'Cyber/Gen-X Corporate' style. Sometimes other contemporaneous aesthetics like Multiplex Deco or Cyber Gen-X Corporate are incorporated, albeit with a cartoon-ified touch. 'Hypnosis spirals' are a common motif, interesting considering the demographic & controversy around children's marketing during that era.

[tangibletechnomancy]

Saw someone earlier say that the popular millennial/early gen Z reaction to AI tech is very comparable to Gen X-ish's reactions to GMOs, and...I can no longer find that post but I can't help but feel that to be true on a lot of levels.

As stated in that post, both technologies have their very legitimate problems - with GMOs, it's Monsanto being fucking evil and trying to monopolize plants and food, or GMO herbicide resistance being used so that major corporate farms can saturate the land with said herbicides without any short-term financial damage to the companies as if it doesn't harm the environment; with AI, it's any form of automation always appealing to the most abusive of corporate greed - but both ended up whipped into a dogmatic fervor about something completely not only irrelevant but made-up and reactionary ("GMOs are all POISON, nature knows best ALWAYS!" - which led semi-directly to the antivaxx movement btw / "it doesn't matter how different it is from the input taking inspiration from existing works the WRONG way is PLAGIARISM, you're rewarding LAZINESS, and REAL ART vs. FAKE ART is totally an objective distinction that can be made and certainly not at all a fascist talking point, and I want art made by HUMANS, the humans running these programs to express something from their human brains don't count!"), completely ignoring that GMOs have reduced world hunger and given us valuable conservation tools, and AI is giving people - real people, not machines - more expressive capacity, serving as a valuable research tool into what kinds of things people tend to associate, justly or otherwise; and even being used to augment human judgment for things such as reviewing biopsy results, finding cancers that otherwise may have gone unnoticed for months or even years longer. In fact, many opponents will full on deny any of these benefits - "what good does reducing hunger do if we haven't eliminated it completely AND we're feeding people POISON? In fact, why should I even believe that really happened in the first place!? if you wanted laypeople to be able to read these studies you wouldn't have made them so complicated, you CLEARLY have something to hide!" the anti-GMO warrior asks; "I don't believe those people who are so severely disabled that they couldn't draw or write without AI REALLY exist, your meditation on the nature of data doesn't COUNT, I don't care how many hours you spent on that piece you're TOTALLY being lazy, and I refuse to believe anyone who points out that it's not a copy-paste machine because you CLEARLY have an AGENDA to lie" the anti-AI reactionary claims. Both hold to a belief that ignorance is a virtue, and even TRYING to understand the Bad Side is tantamount to shoving orphans into a wood chipper.

But I'd take it a step further and say that AI is serving a similar sociopolitical purpose in that it's drawing a line in the sand and asking progressives at a certain stage in life - mostly from the ages of 25-35 - "are you willing to acknowledge nuance around subjects that are new and scary to you, or are you going to give into that fear and treat ignorance as a virtue because there ARE undeniably bad things about this and therefore EVERY bad thing you can imagine about it must be true?" Both serve as, essentially, an acid test - will you declare that it's IMPOSSIBLE to be reckless with GMOs, that Monsanto DESERVES to have sole control over the world's food supply because ~they've done so much good~, or that all GMOs are EVIL POISON and GOING TO KILL US ALL and they're also TOTALLY the reason we're all FAT now which is THE WORST thing a person can be? Or are you going to acknowledge that Monsanto is fucking evil, but GMOs as a whole are a complex thing that can, indeed, be created and marketed in some pretty evil ways, but also have the potential to save countless lives? Will you declare that AI is True Sentient AI, the cyber-utopia becoming real; that everything ChatGPT says must be true and OpenAI is our best friend, or that REAL art by HUMANS is going to be destroyed forever and anyone who benefits from AI is inherently evil? Or will you acknowledge that AI, while it has its drawbacks in the form of corporate overpromising people and compromising information reliability by doing so, on top of the perennial labor issues that come with automation and other potential abuses, also has the capacity to dramatically improve and even potentially save lives? Will you work to save the good WHILE rejecting the bad, or will you insist it needs to be shoved in either the good box or the bad box - probably the bad box, if you're an adult?

The answer, I feel, says a lot about the ideological trajectory someone has chosen for their adulthood.

[eblu3]

everyone's done frutiger aero and y2k aesthetic OCs. but I'm out here with a corporate gen-x cyber guy

[jkottke]

An index of dozens of aesthetic categories, from Boho Chic and Corporate Gen-X Cyber to Whimsigothic and Internet Awesomesauce.

[drumlincountry]

I thought, of course, that there would be an organized resistance to that internet, the craven one, that no one would choose to love their own surveillance or live as a personal brand. I didn't think people would willingly hashtag themselves and their feelings into profitable metadata. How funny that we thought the internet was the reverse of what it became: we thought it was turning property into nonproperty, of liberating the common. Perhaps this was because the early internet had at the beginning felt subcultural, was still dominated by Gen X and our ironic self-protections. Didn't everyone know to distrust the Doritos as we ate the Doritos? To be human was to hate while we loved our cool ranch.

I remember when others warned that we were beginning to fall into a system of self-surveillance, that people would begin to watch each other, to keep records, to aggress and suspect. I didn't want to believe it. Part of the appeal of the internet in the early days was that it was a semi-criminal conspiracy of people downloading pirated Weezer albums and Zizek books while cyber-cheating on their spouses and keeping anonymous blogs about their terrifying secrets. Who among these criminals would associate themselves with authority? Who would use the internet to turn others into the police or bosses or corporate moderators? No one I knew, even the most wretched trolls. We were better off practicing anti-facial recognition face paint, I thought, still of the old mind that everyone knew what we had to worry most about was the state and the corporations, not each other. I thought individuals and communities would always know the most simple truth, the one heard in every song on the radio: authority = bad.

I was wrong. Most of the awful things everyone predicted came true, and a lot of the bad no one predicted came true, also. I watched the corporations take on the characteristics of self-aware moral bodies and individuals taking on the moral character of the corporations who mined them for profit. The state became, more than ever, the patient servant of the owners, providing the multinationals with borders and prisons and advantageous legislation and not much else. I watched millions work for the billionaires without pay.

"earthbound shadow of the cloud" by Anne Boyer

[harrelltut]

Every Minute Count [EMC] 4 My Divinely CHOSEN [D.C.] Extravagant Music Clique [EMC] of 144,000 9 Ether Gen X Underground Schwarz [U.S.] Quantum Intranet [Qi] QUADRILLIONAIRES... Mathematically Accessing 1907 Computerized [MAC] Defense Industries [MDI] of the Pentagon's Corporate [PC] iCloud Infrastructure Application [iCIA] Records @ 1921 QUANTUM 2023 HARRELL 2024 TECH 2025 LLC of ATLANTIS [L.A.] 5000

IMMORTAL U.S. MILITARY KING SOLOMON-MICHAEL HARRELL, JR.™

OMMMMM

OMMMMM

NOT OUR INTERACTIVE CIA ASSET MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE [MI = MICHAEL] SYSTEMS?!?!?!

WE ECCENTRIC 1921 MUSIC 1968 CELEBRITIES [EMC] OF THE PENTAGON'S BLACK MILITARY BUDGET

9/11 cyber weapons of mass destruction... wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy above your mundane 2023 pay scale?!?!?!

us golden 144,000 9 ether quadrillionaires ain't on tv

us private intranet engineers control the public telecom internet industry... shhh

OMMMMM

OMMMMM

golden 1968 9 ether gen x trillionaires?!?!?!

AMERICANS DON'T KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS GOLDEN 9 ETHER QUADRILLIONAIRE LIFE... DEEP INSIDE INNER EARTH [Qi]

WE QUANTUM INTRANET [Qi] QUADRILLIONS @ QUANTUM HARRELL TECH LLC

HEIL SCHWARZE SONNE HARRELL!!!

[duplexide]

Dickinson Theater, The Great Mall of the Great Plains

[blockygraphics]

Timeline images from the Intergraph Multimedia CD-ROM (Spring 1994).

[manila-automat]

Visual Merchandising, 1997 PC by Sony Window Display

[aloneandforsakenbyfateandbyman]

The death of Internet forums is so tragic bc really what it did was bring in a new era of surveillance + narcissism.

What I mean by that is for us older Millennials/ Gen X, we grew up in an era where you could impersonally post on the internet yet connect to people in a deeper way.

There were forums on every subject and hobby: history, culture, cars, true crime, sewing, dance, art, film, travel, fashion, gore, cities, food, mental illness, moms, gardening, emos, you name it.

Everything anyone could be interested in had a specific forum dedicated to it with nerds who knew their shit. And these dorks would message other dorks about aspie subjects without having to reveal their face and name.

As the internet grew, it also fell prey to capitalism and now we’re in a sort of cyber oligarchy where a few sites reign supreme. The official word is that forums died bc of “low search visibility,” as if by accident yet that’s not true.

Forums died bc corporations mercilessly slaughtered them for low-quality cesspools such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok etc. These apps are very heavily based on narcissism and government surveillance. You have to login and signup to everything now, and are being constantly tracked.

Instead of having a personality, we are repeatedly inundated with 10 sec videos of teenagers dancing to Abba or dogs rolling over. We don’t bond over shared knowledge, we bond over poorly made memes and videos of pink haired Americans eating food.

The internet wasn’t a high IQ hub of interaction to begin with, but it was still at a much higher level in the early 2000s. They completely rekked everyone’s attention span.

Every forum has been replaced with bland Reddit which always appears on every search engine, and it’s total cuck central. Everything on there is heavily censored, everyone posts such low quality and boring content and it’s like they’ve all been chemically castrated and are bottoms.

I miss when I could hide behind a screen and just LARP as a 40 year old man with erectile dysfunction who collected erotica and read BDSM novels. I hate that They completely destroyed weird forum culture just to lobotomize a new generation of Zoomers who don’t even know what torrents are

[highlyspecificsigns]

the signs as ‘90s/Y2K aesthetics

SOURCE: All photos and info from the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, maybe literally the best thing on the internet?

ARIES: Early Cyber

TAURUS: Deco-Luxe

GEMINI: Memphis and General “Geo-Pomo”

CANCER: Casual Gen-X Soft Home

LEO: McBling

VIRGO: Frutiger Aero

LIBRA: Neo-Y2K

SCORPIO: Whimsigothic

SAGITTARIUS: Factory Pomo

CAPRICORN: Cyber/Gen-X Corporate

AQUARIUS: Pop Surrealism

PISCES: Contempo-Eclectic

[fizznumina]

https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/cyber-gen-x-corporate

[coupanfree]

Cyberpunk 2077 Next-Gen Update Now Available for Xbox Series X|S

Cyberpunk 2077 Next-Gen Update Now Available for Xbox Series X|S

Summary Cyberpunk 2077 Next-Gen Update available now for Xbox Series X|S; free trial also available. Features graphical improvements, faster loading times, ray tracing on Xbox Series X, and more. Free upgrade available for owners of Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox One. Night City. 2077. A dangerous megalopolis filled with cyber-enhanced mercenaries, cutthroat corporations, and tantalizing opportunities.…