5/17/2023 0 Comments Wrought flesh demo![]() While new technology has offered glimpses of a hopeful future in some ways, like watching productivity increase by over 400% since the 1960s, wages have stagnated, homelessness is endemic, and any hopes for universal healthcare have been quashed. CRISPR, GMOs, pig heart transplants and mRNA vaccines define modern scientific innovation. Instead of a dreary television-grey techno-future, innovation lurched in a different, wetter direction. Meatpunk then insists that we are primarily still composed of meat and will most likely be so for the foreseeable future. ![]() Much of what cyberpunk envisioned, like cyber-augmentation or neural computers, never came to pass–at least, at least not in the ways envisioned. In these worlds, meat is everything from currency to health, and the world feels ill because of it.Ĭyberpunk, on the other hand, was defined by a fear of/fascination with technology as well as the growing influence of Asian economic powerhouses (not to mention a fair bit of attendant Orientalism). For example, Cruelty Squad tasks the player with assassinating CEOs using grapple-hooks made from your internal organs, eating guts on the floor in order to regain health, and trading livers on the open market to catch a big break. Games like Extreme Meatpunks Forever, Cruelty Squad, Wrought Flesh, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator rely on organic body parts, and their subsequent destruction, to outline horrifying and sublime truths about the world, our economic system and the horrors of having a body at all. Meatpunk is a relatively new genre of fiction defined by gross human meat being used in new and macabre ways. They use everything about the hog except the squeal. Meatpunk was poised to beat cyberpunk to death with its gross limbs. Through an accident of science, I glimpsed a fleshy future in meatpunk. Thus I dove deeper into the dark depths of the Internet, where I would find the tenacity I was looking for in a new kind of sci-fi. Solarpunk, while positive and aspirational, lacked the tenacity required to break us out of the hellish now. Early in my search for whatever was going to come next, I discovered solarpunk: an aesthetic brimming with greenery and hope for a better world. Seeing cyberpunk’s limp body strangely reanimated by capitalist tendrils, I knew we needed something new. ![]() At first I found it impossible to imagine any other set of aesthetics capable of describing the miasma of the present. Nevertheless, Cyberpunk 2077’s shaky landing confirmed what many already feared: Cyberpunk’s utility as a tool of criticism was drying up. Millions of others clearly felt the same way as the cyberpunk aesthetic utterly dominated the last 30 years of critical popular culture and a means of expressing discontent. For me personally, things like The Matrix, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, and Akira were the first pieces of media I consumed which provided the language and ideas I could use to be critical of a world I felt was wrong in ways I just couldn’t otherwise describe. I think a lot of people in my generation are disappointed by how quickly cyberpunk as an aesthetic became commercialized and lost its critical edge. ![]() Upton Sinclair, The Jungle A Eulogy For The Dark Dream We All Shared The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down. This is the first in a series of stories about Meatpunk, a game genre that includes titles like Extreme Meatpunks Forever and Cruelty Squad, but, as the author argues, goes much deeper than that. ![]()
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