I’ve been thinking about cyberpunk’s fixation on the Ship of Theseus “how much of a human can you replace until they stop being human” and it all comes down to ableist bullshit, I hate it so much
We are done with examining the ship of Theseus, it’s finished now.
Trans people: having the ability to modify my body would drastically improve my quality of life.
Disabled people: having the ability to modify my body would drastically improve my quality of life.
Lots of other people: having the ability to modify my body would drastically improve my quality of life.
Ignorant fucks who don’t deserve cyberpunk: but what if… we shamed that? 🤔
Writers of the original Cyberpunk RPG where this trope first came up: We have to give body mods some kind of drawback for game-balance purposes, so why don’t we do something interesting with it and explore the question of how drastically an individual can modify themselves before bodily dysphoria starts to mess with their head? And let’s read up a bit on depersonalisation-derealisation disorder and use it as an example of what end-stage cyberpsychosis might be like to experience. A depressing number of cyberpunk writers since: Nah, too complicated, let’s just make them weird and freaky and not really human anymore and leave it at that.
Also, original cyberpunk writers: You should be careful about injecting technology into your body because corproations WILL use it to spy on you or manipulate you for their own benefit. -Admin
which is happening now
Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”
It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.
Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.
Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”
Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn’t mince words: “It is fantastic technology and a lousy company,” he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. “She said, ‘Well, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,’ ” he remembers. “She said, ‘By the way, you’re not getting your upgrades.’ ”
These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.