Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
>Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
> used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S
to be fair this is explicitly a theme in the (imo unjustly maligned) sequels
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
The UK certainly have had its own counterculture. In some ways more than the US. That still doesn't take away from the franchises being published (and in parts made) by US companies with US culture in them.
The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.
A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
So… your argument is that it’s not counterculture unless it’s mainstream culture? And that one should only credit derivative works once they become mainstream, rather than the original inspiring works because they were too obscure?
I don’t think anyone is trying to “gotcha” you. You’ve just got a bad take.
I think it is actually pretty difficult to look at countries and say which ones have successful countercultures. I mean to some extent if a counterculture is successful it becomes not a counterculture, just part of the mainstream culture. On the other hand, a maximally out-of-mainstream counterculture is a totally unknown thing that we’ve never heard of as outsiders.
Counterculture is a culture that is counter to the mainstream culture. If a culture is happy on its own, it is more of just a subculture. Cyberpunk itself features counterculture not just subculture, but is also inspired by the counterculture at the time.
Cyberpunk doesn't randomly contain megacorporations, harsh environments and loneliness but it reflects the worst-case scenario for the ideals at the time. The grey skies and rain is because of pollution having destroyed environment as was relevant in concerns over acid rain or the oil crisis at the time. It is literally in the name with "punk". Japan doesn't have that much counterculture so it could never be that influential in cyberpunk. Just like it could never be that influential in music.
Something can be obscure and influential, but there is a limit to how defining it can be. Akira and Ghost in the Shell (and some video games) have been influential and are frequently credited for that, but that is about it. Everything else including similar media before and at the same time as them comes from mixing in other things [0]. Just like in music.
Korea is currently success with K-pop. But that is nothing in terms of influence compared to TikTok.
tl;dr: Cyberpunk is counterculture. Japan doesn't really do counterculture. Therefor it isn't very influential in cyberpunk despite having had influence.
i dunno. some of the most influential d-beat/crust bands of all time are from japan (d-clone, disclose, gauze, gallhammer, gism, death side... that's barely scratching the surface of bands that are/were actively countercultural).
it may not always take the same form, but anywhere you find big cities, you'll find some form of countercultural punk movement because the economy is big enough to support people at the fringes (even if you just work as a bartender or whatever).
By the early 90s, “cyberpunk” had largely become self parody, meaning that the counter culture was already rejecting cyberpunk as too mainstream. Search around for the Usenet reactions to Billy Idol’s album of the same name.
Or take a look at the opening sequence of Snow Crash, where the deliverator is clearly making fun of ubiquitous cyberpunk tropes. At the time it was considered a tombstone for cyberpunk, rather than some sort of positive signal milestone.
These are only two data points to demonstrate that the “counterculture” era had already expired in the US by the early 90s, as members of that counterculture felt that it had already stopped being counter to any part of American culture.
The claim that there is “not much Japanese counterculture” is too bizarre for me to wrap my head around. The more traditional a society is, the more “counter” any underground culture is —- by definition.
American counterculture hasn’t really properly existed outside of capitalist smother and capture since the early 90s either by the way. Give No Logo a read for more on that.
> The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC
Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The songs weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.
> bands were at times left to tour elsewhere
You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
> UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1
I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.
In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.
> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies
Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.
UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
I read an interview in the back of one of the volumes of Gundam: Origin where original series creators Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Yoshiyuki Tomino reflected on their history in the student protest movement of the 1960s. It was a fascinating read because I didn't know anything about the Japanese New Left, and all of a sudden it made Gundam click for me in a way that it hadn't before.
It also made me realize that my knowledge of Japanese history and culture was extremely limited, but because I consumed a lot of Japanese media I vastly overstated my own knowledge. These days I try not to make sweeping statements comparing our respective countries.
I would suggest you think about what you don't know.
"my country counterculture is so much better" could be ridiculously funny if it wasn't so sad to consider a presumably intelligent adult could utter it in complete sincerity.
Producing more in quantity, with far biggest allocated budget, and even better quality on everything that can be measured at surface level, all that is no guarantee to reach a work that is deeper in spirit.
Those who don't question what's wrong in themselves due specifically to the culture they were fed with are not on the path to elude its sway.
Right: bascially, 1980s-vintage William Gibson is a post-New-Wave SF writer who's a fan of hard-boiled novels and of New Hollywood "outlaw" bohemianism, so his heroes are pimps, thieves and murderers. 1980s-vintage Shirow is a fan of military SF, so his heroes are paramilitary death squads. Now, that's a little jaded, but I think mostly simply accurate. I don't think that generalises well to a US/Japan distinction though. As others have said, Akira is surely more of an outsider story. (Beyond cyberpunk, have a look at the political backgrounds of senior Ghibli people like Isao Takahata, Kondo Yoshifumi and Hayao Miyazaki. I've read somewhere, but can't confirm, that people like that tended to end up in animation precisely because Communists were blackballed out from more respectable industries.) And the US is the land of Dirty Harry and Niven and Pournelle as much as Bonnie and Clyde and Blade Runner.
> Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...
It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?
IIRC Switch was originally conceived as having one gender in the outside "real" world but another when incarnated in the Matrix (where your own self body image defines you). Hence their name - they switched.
This was all dropped at some point - the only surviving relic being the name of the character.
You're right about Switch but the other context is one of the Matrix directors said the original idea for The Matrix was a trans metaphor.
Somehow this became "the Matrix is a trans metaphor" to people with poor media literacy skills.
There was also an unfinished plot thread in The Matrix Online that a woman who emerged from a coma at the same time Neo died may or may not be a reincarnated Neo. This story setup was never concluded or followed up on.
"Fans were quick to note that "Sarah Edmontons" is an anagram for "Thomas Anderson," leading many players to believe Neo may have been reborn as Sarah after dying."
Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.
It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..
I really don't think Yakuza games are anything like GTA besides "being in a city". Yakuza has none of the sandbox elements like GTA, the city is more like an elaborate menu to go from mission to mission/side quest/activity.
No it wasn't. The question was that if regulation creates more competition with Apple what are the markets with this competition?
European companies compete with US companies, including Apple, in areas where there is competition. In music software, music streaming, engineering and finance software, services and so on.
Apple has around 33% smartphone market share in Europe. Where is the US competition? Google at 3%. The actual competition is non-US in Samsung and Xiaomi. You can argue that Google competes with the Play Store, but then there is no competition with the Play Store on Android from the US.
Big US tech companies don't compete with each other as much as one might think. Most of their revenue comes from dominating one area or platform, with little competition from the rest.
So therefor the common conclusion that Europe should be more like the US to have competition also doesn't make sense as the big US tech companies don't have serious direct competition in the US in their core businesses.
You can't compete with the big tech companies by creating a Google with 3% market share in smartphones to compete with Apple, a Walmart with 6% online retail market share to compete with Amazon, or a Microsoft with 4% search engine market share to compete with Google.
I'm sure you could look that up for yourself pretty easily if you were actually curious and not trying to make some unknown point by asking the question.
> The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.
And how do you compete with the big tech companies without it? It's been decades without anyone being able to do it. Not in Europe and not in the US. OpenAI might have a chance, but they also have billions.
The days where someone could drop out of school and start a company in the garage is over. Cost of living is up, so is competition. Companies need to expand and regulation like GDPR makes it easier to do so instead of having to deal with multiple countries regulation. The US always had an advantage in regulation like the DMCA.
To spell it out, before regulation European companies had to...
Deal with privacy regulation of each country. Which in the EU was supposed to be similar, but wasn't entirely. With GDPR not only is it the same in the EU, but other countries are now following the same model.
Register for VAT in every EU country it sold (enough) products in. Making many not sell to other countries at all until Amazon ate their business. With VAT MOSS you only register in you own country.
Accept many form of payments with many different fees since credit card adoption and cost could vary wildly. With interchange fees capped you increasingly only need to accept common credit cards.
Pay large roaming charges when traveling, making starting services like Uber or Airbnb less relevant since you couldn't assume someone had data in another country.
Try to compete with big tech companies that were charging for access to their platforms while minimizing their taxes through royalty payments, VAT deals and offshore holdings. Giving them a huge advantage. This is still the case, but lesser so.
For actually running a company it is a lot better now.
There are other problems with EU regulations. Some things are natural monopolies or in other ways doesn't do well as markets. Privatization and state-aid rules prevent European countries from effectively managing these areas. Any advantage Europe had over the US in cost of living and public services is rapidly diminishing.
In some ways, it is just more noticeable now. Because even countries like the US had a huge push for public infrastructure in the road network, state schools and energy when those things were both more and less important than now. Now urban housing, broad education and energy efficiency have become more important with changes in society and the economy. But there isn't the same public influence in those areas now.
That is, there were always estates, land, and business. And private education. Just that public investment created and enabled other opportunities. A massive road network enabled sprawl where additional housing could be constructed at a decent cost. Now the economy wants density for network effects, but there isn't a similar expansion in public transport. So urban housing has become very valuable.
> Comparison data also showed that at every wealth level in the U.S., mortality rates were higher than those in the parts of Europe the researchers studied. The nation’s wealthiest Americans have shorter lifespans on average than the wealthiest Europeans; in some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.
> Just as in other countries, chronic conditions like heart disease are major factors in how many years Americans remain alive but in poor health. But, the authors add, a high burden of mental health and behavioral conditions — which the WHO groups together, and include depression, anxiety and addictions to alcohol and drugs — are also weighing heavily on our health span, as well as curtailing life expectancy in the U.S.
> Underpinning both chronic diseases and what are sometimes called deaths or diseases of “despair,” such as addiction, is the prevalence of loneliness, stress and inequality in the U.S., Gurven says. “It’s hard to avoid that living in a highly unequal society is stressful and that takes a toll on our health in so many ways,” he says. That inequality affects not only access to health care, but can also be seen in how little opportunity there is for Americans in many parts of the country to get physical activity or healthy meals in their busy days, helping to fuel the obesity epidemic, which, in turn, curtails health span.
It think the site is an interesting exercise. If nothing else to show that science fiction doesn't have to happen like we might think it does. There is no space elevator, but 1 million people in the air at any given time. There is no matrix, but many lifetimes have been spent in World of Warcraft. Reality doesn't need to switch context for things to change, which is often what science fiction does.
They don't have the capacity. The opinion you present is actually part of the narrative you are seemingly against. That you can compete with big tech if you just want to.
And you "can" compete with big tech, but it isn't actually possible. Because the right pre-requisites, environment and priorities doesn't exist. Not in Europe, not in much of the US and not in much of the world.
The European companies the would (or could) prioritize having their own digital infrastructure (mostly research or more industrial companies) are also having lay-offs, or at least not growing close to more service oriented companies that are hooked into big tech.
For the same types of reasons the US also won't bring back manufacturing.
Edit: It also reminds me of a story from some time ago in Sweden. Because of the growing number of fashion designers the press were talking about the growing fashion industry as "the fashion wonder". The then CEO of H&M commented in an interview that most of these brands were making less revenue than just one of their stores. Many of these companies are now dead or irrelevant while H&M, Zara and Shein are still around and more relevant than ever.
If there actually was even more a shift to the web from desktop it would probably benefit Google with ChromeOS. Just like a shift from Windows for software development benefited Apple and their more closed ecosystem.
I think it's a question of habit / inertia. "This is how we've always done things".
In the company I work for, 99% of people spend their days in some combination of teams, outlook, word, excel and chrome. Word is basically for random text which is expected to last longer than an email or for carting around screenshots, Excel is for people who need five lines in a table. All these things work fine in a browser. The other 1% are either accountants who actually use Excel for what it was made, designers, etc.
Among those 99% there are a bunch of people shouting from the rooftops how much security is a priority for the company, so they run around in circles trying to secure a fundamentally insecure OS, while at the same time being scared shitless to update anything for fear of "breaking something". I'm convinced that moving to something like Chrome OS would improve these 99% of people's lives tremendously. But it's not what they're used to, so everybody just keeps on going down the same path.
I also think something fundamental is missing in the education of your average office worker.
The reason why people are scared to change software is that they can't actually use any software. They basically don't know how it works and are just cargo culting. They memorize some functions, and they think that is all they need to do their job, which they consider to be some higher level thing like being a bureaucrat.
But it's like literacy. You're not literate when you can only read one book. You're literate when you can read any book.
There are principles in how software works, below the level of the programmer, that everyone can learn. What is running on my machine, what is running on the server, why do I see the things on the screen that I see, what do common GUI elements do, and so on.
I entirely agree with you, but I'm at a loss as to how we might improve things.
People just don't seem to care, just like they didn't seem to care to understand how machinery used to work. They know that they should press this button and expect that outcome.
We teach reading in school. I think the same could be done now for tech literacy.
It was pointless to try something like that before because the older generation was usually less tech literate than the kids. But these days tech literacy is dropping (and with AI, probably even more so), so it might be that the older generation could actually teach it.
As a programmer I fully understand and even support what you suggest, but I’m not sure it will ever work. My mother, wife, good friend, etc - none of them can grok what a computer program is, or the file system. I’ve tried and tried for many years and it just doesn’t click. On the other hand, I’m realizing more and more how ‘blind’ I am when it comes to color, fashion, decorating, shapes, etc. My logical left-brain merges perfectly with computers, but not more squishy things. Many friends and family are the opposite. I don’t think teaching can overcome that basic wiring. We’re just different.
At the other extreme, also fire anyone who uses Excel as an app development platform or a databse. Fire even faster if its used for something mission critical.
Quick comment regarding the "Swedish fashion wonder": It's definitely a pyramid, but I can for sure name a bunch that definitely makes more than most H&M stores. And they keep popping up, and are definitely not irrelevant.
According to ChatGPT avg revenue of H&M stores in Sweden is 5.4 MEUR. If I remember correctly from my market research (I co-founded a Swedish SaaS targeting fashion brands) there at least 100 with more revenue then that - and they're definitely making most revenue outside of Sweden. To name a few; Djerf Avenue, Filippa K, Stronger, ICIW, Peak Performance, CHIMI eyewear, Tiger of Sweden, J Lindeberg... Heck, I can even name drop a bunch doing footwear more or less only; Axel Arigato, Icebug, Björn Borg, Eytys...
But yeah, most brands are doing less. It's a pyramid. But no, Swedish fashion brands (excl H&M) are definitely not irrelevant.
You say that the priorities are missing, but this article is about just that: this politician is changing the priorities. Admittedly for a rather small number of office workers, but it should be seen as a pilot project. Half the ministry staff will be off MS Office by end of summer, is the plan.
No, they aren't. These things happen all the time. Anyone can install Linux on a few laptops. Heck, 'anyone' can create their own Linux distribution. And plenty do. To make a difference they need to hire staff to actually manage it. And because Linux doesn't have the same facilities they probably need to be developers. Europe doesn't have a track record of hiring developers for government service. As a politician from the "Moderates" she is likely against it. It's now all privatization all the time. The US ironically does. I bet this doesn't last much longer than until there is a new minister for digitalisation.
You're assuming they don't know how to make this work -- with that assumption, of course you can claim that they won't get it to work.
If you have any evidence that they are have not staffed the IT department with the right people to make this work, yo ucan go right ahead and post it...
I think some careful optimism is warranted here. At least someone is showing some will to change the status quo, which is what I'm missing from the European leadership in general.
> If something isn't important to know, there's no answer to the question of why people don't know it. Not knowing random facts is the default. But if you're going to write about things that are important to know, you have to ask why your readers don't already know them. Is it because they're smart but inexperienced, or because they're obtuse?
So you can claim to have been homeless, or have experience having been homeless, but then you will be judged as having that experience. That isn't how you presented the story, but as a successful experiment where living in a dorm for $450 a month was also a good option. The redeeming lesson from such an experiment is that "being homeless isn't that bad" because "you weren't really homeless" not because "others also could have somewhere to live". The two has completely different implications.
You aren't being "gatekept" out of bad faith, but because it is nicer to believe that you are mistaken than the alternative. Because if you claim to actually have been homeless the story reads more like you put yourself above the rules, didn't consider your friends and don't understand the difference.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.