That’s what it says on my jacket. My weirdly puffy, annoyingly yellow, impressively armored and oh-so-very cyberpunk jacket. Because Cyberpunk 2077 operates almost exclusively in a claustrophobic first-person, I can’t actually see the slogan sloppily written on my super-cool popped-collar jacket except when I’m tinkering with my loadout on the inventory screen. But I know it’s there. I know it’s there all the time.
“Burn Corpo Sh**”
I mean, that’s part of the psychological deal we make with video games, right? We invest in the fiction that we are who we play. In this case, it’s V — the main character in CD Project Red’s massively hyped, massively disappointing open-world pantsless-motorcycle-riding-simulator. V can be anyone. They are you, whoever you want to be. They are me, every minute that I play. And they are wearing that stupid jacket with its stupid slogan which I refuse to take off and which, eventually, will become symbolic to me of everything that’s wrong with this game — everything sour and broken at the heart of it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is about … nothing. There’s a plot of sorts. A kind of threaded narrative about a heist gone wrong in such a way that V ends up with Keanu Reeves permanently stuck living in his head. But it isn’t about anything. You run around collecting guns and meeting people and (mostly) killing them and (occasionally) just talking to them, and both options are terrible because the killing is almost always pointless and the talking, somehow, is even worse because the writing is so, so bad.
Keanu Reeves plays a character called Johnny Silverhand, a rockerboy from 50 years back in the game’s timeline who — for only the most vaguely defined or defended reasons — nuked the headquarters of one of the biggest corporations in Night City and killed thousands of people. Like actually blew it up with a nuclear weapon. Johnny Silverhand is a full-on terrorist, but he’s the good guy in this story. Kinda. Because, you know …
“Burn Corpo Sh**”
Because of what my jacket says. Because in the Cyberpunk universe, corporations are bad and corporate elitism is the dominant evil and the rape-and-pillage corpo culture is what has brought the world to the state that it is in where V — my V and your V — lives as a street-level mercenary, selling his or her gun hand, cybernetic implants and abject lack of personality to anyone who’ll pay. V dreams of someday becoming the best merc in the city. Of being remembered, like Johnny Silverhand is remembered, for, ostensibly, burning corpo sh**.
And that’s all. That’s the game’s entire underlying rationale and animating ethos summed up in three words Sharpie’d onto an ugly jacket that I wear long past its point of in-game usefulness because it is such a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the game — everything cheap and shallow and thoughtless and vain.
There are other problems, to be sure. Serious ones. Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to be the biggest game of the year. A decade in development, years of hype, a breathless final run-up to launch day, launch hour and launch minute — this was it. The One. Greatest thing since the last great thing.
And if you care at all about video games, you already know what happened next. The game was a mess. On next-gen consoles and high-powered gaming PCs, it’s kind of a mess — a beautiful, glossy, immersive mess, but still a mess — and on last-gen systems (PS4 and Xbox One), it’s a complete, irredeemable, janky, low-rent, almost laughable mess. It glitches, it crashes, it chugs and strains to operate at even a basic level. Textures are muddy, blurred or lost in stuttering pop-in. Look fast, uncritically, and it almost seems like you’re wandering through a real sci-fi city with its soaring architecture and grubby alleys, but linger even briefly and you notice how lo-fi, flat and pixelated everything looks.
These technical issues got CP2077 pulled from the Playstation Store late last week. CDPR has already begun offering refunds for gamers who felt cheated by the divide between what they were promised and what was ultimately delivered. It has been a complete disaster for everyone involved — a team that was already dealing with disasters over crunch, release delays, trans representation and a dozen other things.
But the jacket and its stupid slogan is a fishhook. It sticks in me and I can’t get it out. Its clunky wording, bumper-sticker shallowness and unearned patina of faux-outrage is like a distillation of everything wrong with the game. It’s like an Eat The Rich t-shirt with the Hot Topic price tag still on it; like Starbucks selling lattes in decorative All War Is Class War mugs. It’s evidence that the team at CDPR either had no idea how to handle the source material they were given, or didn’t care to think beyond it.
Fact: I played Cyberpunk back in the early 90’s when it was just a tabletop RPG inspired by Blade Runner and William Gibson’s sprawl stories. It was a product of its time, existing in a universe with space stations and cyberarms, but without cellphones. The way we played it — the way my teenage friends and I read ourselves into the world — was as small-time operators, always. The corporations were behemoths, the system so massively corrupt and powerful that no one could win against it. You fought to survive around the edges of it, living off the scraps. “High stakes, low impact” — that was our house rule. Because punks don’t save the world. Ever. They just try to live another day.
But CP2077 doesn’t work that way. Worlds and fortunes hang in the balance of everything V does. He (I played him as a man, though there are options) rubs shoulders with corporate titans and goes to space. The V of the main plot is different than the V of the side content, no matter how you play it. Moment to moment, he’s streetracing, fighting gangsters, solving crimes, shooting up brothels or chasing down missing cabs for a self-driving car company. His core motivation, reinforced early and often, is to be the best killer Night City has ever seen. The best merc. The most dependable. Whatever. What he truly wants is simply to be remembered. In a future where absolutely everything is disposable, V just wants to leave an indelible mark.
And really, that’s not bad. You could build an interesting character and a moving story around that. It’s something, right?
But to do so, the game would have to address two issues, both intertwined. First, there’s the bonkers assumption that the only way to make a mark in this world is to be a really good killer. Second, that this world is bad enough that it makes the first conjecture seem reasonable. And in order for there to be any story at all, the game must interrogate one or the other — either V’s motivations or the world’s death wish — and then come to some sort of conclusion.
And that’s where CP2077 fails. It does neither. It seems to believe that presentation is enough. Like, here’s V. He wants to be very good at a job that mostly involves shooting people at the behest of cops and/or corporations. And now there’s a rockstar/terrorist from 50 years ago living in his head. Isn’t that a crazy world? Okay, now let’s go blow some stuff up.
And even though V is ostensibly going through the motions of trying to get Johnny Silverhand out of his head before he dies of terminal Keanu poisoning (or something else equally ludicrous), V spends a lot of his time in Night City just capping people on the streets for a $10 payout from the cops or watching corporate soldiers gun down striking workers. There are nice moments in the game, sure. Any time I spent with Takemura (a disgraced ex-bodyguard vital to the main plot) was a pleasure. Judy is a badass. Playing around with hacking and braindance editing was fun. And there were views in Night City which were stunningly lovely. But I spent far more time as V working with various cops and corporations than I did burning any of their sh**.
The game tries so hard to be cool — to come off as crass and edgy, to talk tough and play like some kind of anti-capitalist anarchy generator. But you lean too hard into that act and it will always come off more like a desperate pose than anything honest. One of the reasons I think I had so much trouble getting into the game is that all the gloss and chrome and affected, fake punkery gelled together like a hard shell in the first hours. No matter what I did, I just kept bouncing off, unable to get past the surface of it, told to act punk and do whatever I wanted, but then offered only a narrow spread of pre-approved systemic options that usually broke down to a) shoot everyone, b) have sex with a robot, c) buy things, d) quit.
I hung with it, but honestly? Quitting is the most punk option of them all. I wanted to love this game. I really did. I’ve been waiting decades for someone to take my teenage techno-dystopian fantasies and turn them into something I could play around in. But names and labels aside, this ain’t that. It’s all surface, no depth. All signal, no content. You wanna stick it to the mega-corps and hit ’em where it really hurts, choom? Just turn the game off and walk away. You wanna burn it all down?
You do that by refusing to play.
Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphiamagazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
Although no one likes a know-it-all, they dominate the Internet.
The Internet began as a vast repository of information. It quickly became a breeding ground for self-proclaimed experts seeking what most people desire: recognition and money.
Today, anyone with an Internet connection and some typing skills can position themselves, regardless of their education or experience, as a subject matter expert (SME). From relationship advice, career coaching, and health and nutrition tips to citizen journalists practicing pseudo-journalism, the Internet is awash with individuals—Internet talking heads—sharing their “insights,” which are, in large part, essentially educated guesses without the education or experience.
The Internet has become a 24/7/365 sitcom where armchair experts think they’re the star.
Not long ago, years, sometimes decades, of dedicated work and acquiring education in one’s field was once required to be recognized as an expert. The knowledge and opinions of doctors, scientists, historians, et al. were respected due to their education and experience. Today, a social media account and a knack for hyperbole are all it takes to present oneself as an “expert” to achieve Internet fame that can be monetized.
On the Internet, nearly every piece of content is self-serving in some way.
The line between actual expertise and self-professed knowledge has become blurry as an out-of-focus selfie. Inadvertently, social media platforms have created an informal degree program where likes and shares are equivalent to degrees. After reading selective articles, they’ve found via and watching some TikTok videos, a person can post a video claiming they’re an herbal medicine expert. Their new “knowledge,” which their followers will absorb, claims that Panda dung tea—one of the most expensive teas in the world and isn’t what its name implies—cures everything from hypertension to existential crisis. Meanwhile, registered dietitians are shaking their heads, wondering how to compete against all the misinformation their clients are exposed to.
More disturbing are individuals obsessed with evangelizing their beliefs or conspiracy theories. These people write in-depth blog posts, such as Elvis Is Alive and the Moon Landings Were Staged, with links to obscure YouTube videos, websites, social media accounts, and blogs. Regardless of your beliefs, someone or a group on the Internet shares them, thus confirming your beliefs.
Misinformation is the Internet’s currency used to get likes, shares, and engagement; thus, it often spreads like a cosmic joke. Consider the prevalence of clickbait headlines:
You Won’t Believe What Taylor Swift Says About Climate Change!
This Bedtime Drink Melts Belly Fat While You Sleep!
In One Week, I Turned $10 Into $1 Million!
Titles that make outrageous claims are how the content creator gets reads and views, which generates revenue via affiliate marketing, product placement, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Clickbait headlines are how you end up watching a TikTok video by a purported nutrition expert adamantly asserting you can lose belly fat while you sleep by drinking, for 14 consecutive days, a concoction of raw eggs, cinnamon, and apple cider vinegar 15 minutes before going to bed.
Our constant search for answers that’ll explain our convoluted world and our desire for shortcuts to success is how Internet talking heads achieve influencer status. Because we tend to seek low-hanging fruits, we listen to those with little experience or knowledge of the topics they discuss yet are astute enough to know what most people want to hear.
There’s a trend, more disturbing than spreading misinformation, that needs to be called out: individuals who’ve never achieved significant wealth or traded stocks giving how-to-make-easy-money advice, the appeal of which is undeniable. Several people I know have lost substantial money by following the “advice” of Internet talking heads.
Anyone on social media claiming to have a foolproof money-making strategy is lying. They wouldn’t be peddling their money-making strategy if they could make easy money.
Successful people tend to be secretive.
Social media companies design their respective algorithms to serve their advertisers—their source of revenue—interest; hence, content from Internet talking heads appears most prominent in your feeds. When a video of a self-professed expert goes viral, likely because it pressed an emotional button, the more people see it, the more engagement it receives, such as likes, shares and comments, creating a cycle akin to a tornado.
Imagine scrolling through your TikTok feed and stumbling upon a “scientist” who claims they can predict the weather using only aluminum foil, copper wire, sea salt and baking soda. You chuckle, but you notice his video got over 7,000 likes, has been shared over 600 times and received over 400 comments. You think to yourself, “Maybe this guy is onto something.” What started as a quest to achieve Internet fame evolved into an Internet-wide belief that weather forecasting can be as easy as DIY crafts.
Since anyone can call themselves “an expert,” you must cultivate critical thinking skills to distinguish genuine expertise from self-professed experts’ self-promoting nonsense. While the absurdity of the Internet can be entertaining, misinformation has serious consequences. The next time you read a headline that sounds too good to be true, it’s probably an Internet talking head making an educated guess; without the education seeking Internet fame, they can monetize.
TORONTO – A new survey says a majority of software engineers and developers feel tight project deadlines can put safety at risk.
Seventy-five per cent of the 1,000 global workers who responded to the survey released Tuesday say pressure to deliver projects on time and on budget could be compromising critical aspects like safety.
The concern is even higher among engineers and developers in North America, with 77 per cent of those surveyed on the continent reporting the urgency of projects could be straining safety.
The study was conducted between July and September by research agency Coleman Parkes and commissioned by BlackBerry Ltd.’s QNX division, which builds connected-car technology.
The results reflect a timeless tug of war engineers and developers grapple with as they balance the need to meet project deadlines with regulations and safety checks that can slow down the process.
Finding that balance is an issue that developers of even the simplest appliances face because of advancements in technology, said John Wall, a senior vice-president at BlackBerry and head of QNX.
“The software is getting more complicated and there is more software whether it’s in a vehicle, robotics, a toaster, you name it… so being able to patch vulnerabilities, to prevent bad actors from doing malicious acts is becoming more and more important,” he said.
The medical, industrial and automotive industries have standardized safety measures and anything they produce undergoes rigorous testing, but that work doesn’t happen overnight. It has to be carried out from the start and then at every step of the development process.
“What makes safety and security difficult is it’s an ongoing thing,” Wall said. “It’s not something where you’ve done it, and you are finished.”
The Waterloo, Ont.-based business found 90 per cent of its survey respondents reported that organizations are prioritizing safety.
However, when asked about why safety may not be a priority for their organization, 46 per cent of those surveyed answered cost pressures and 35 per cent said a lack of resources.
That doesn’t surprise Wall. Delays have become rampant in the development of tech, and in some cases, stand to push back the launch of vehicle lines by two years, he said.
“We have to make sure that people don’t compromise on safety and security to be able to get products out quicker,” he said.
“What we don’t want to see is people cutting corners and creating unsafe situations.”
The survey also took a peek at security breaches, which have hit major companies like London Drugs, Indigo Books & Music, Giant Tiger and Ticketmaster in recent years.
About 40 per cent of the survey’s respondents said they have encountered a security breach in their employer’s operating system. Those breaches resulted in major impacts for 27 per cent of respondents, moderate impacts for 42 per cent and minor impacts for 27 per cent.
“There are vulnerabilities all the time and this is what makes the job very difficult because when you ship the software, presumably the software has no security vulnerabilities, but things get discovered after the fact,” Wall said.
Security issues, he added, have really come to the forefront of the problems developers face, so “really without security, you have no safety.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.
As online shoppers hunt for bargains offered by Amazon during its annual fall sale this week, cybersecurity researchers are warning Canadians to beware of an influx of scammers posing as the tech giant.
In the 30 days leading up to Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days, taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, there were more than 1,000 newly registered Amazon-related web domains, according to Check Point Software Technologies, a company that offers cybersecurity solutions.
The company said it deemed 88 per cent of those domains malicious or suspicious, suggesting they could have been set up by scammers to prey on vulnerable consumers. One in every 54 newly created Amazon-related domain included the phrase “Amazon Prime.”
“They’re almost indiscernible from the real Amazon domain,” said Robert Falzon, head of engineering at Check Point in Canada.
“With all these domains registered that look so similar, it’s tricking a lot of people. And that’s the whole intent here.”
Falzon said Check Point Research sees an uptick in attempted scams around big online shopping days throughout the year, including Prime Days.
Scams often come in the form of phishing emails, which are deceptive messages that appear to be from a reputable source in attempt to steal sensitive information.
In this case, he said scammers posing as Amazon commonly offer “outrageous” deals that appear to be associated with Prime Days, in order to trick recipients into clicking on a malicious link.
The cybersecurity firm said it has identified and blocked 100 unique Amazon Prime-themed scam emails targeting organizations and consumers over the past two weeks.
Scammers also target Prime members with unsolicited calls, claiming urgent account issues and requesting payment information.
“It’s like Christmas for them,” said Falzon.
“People expect there to be significant savings on Prime Day, so they’re not shocked that they see something of significant value. Usually, the old adage applies: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
Amazon’s website lists a number of red flags that it recommends customers watch for to identify a potential impersonation scam.
Those include false urgency, requests for personal information, or indications that the sender prefers to complete the purchase outside of the Amazon website or mobile app.
Scammers may also request that customers exclusively pay with gift cards, a claim code or PIN. Any notifications about an order or delivery for an unexpected item should also raise alarm bells, the company says.
“During busy shopping moments, we tend to see a rise in impersonation scams reported by customers,” said Amazon spokeswoman Octavia Roufogalis in a statement.
“We will continue to invest in protecting consumers and educating the public on scam avoidance. We encourage consumers to report suspected scams to us so that we can protect their accounts and refer bad actors to law enforcement to help keep consumers safe.”
Falzon added that these scams are more successful than people might think.
As of June 30, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre said there had been $284 million lost to fraud so far this year, affecting 15,941 victims.
But Falzon said many incidents go unreported, as some Canadians who are targeted do not know how or where to flag a scam, or may choose not to out of embarrassment.
Check Point recommends Amazon customers take precautions while shopping on Prime Days, including by checking URLs carefully, creating strong passwords on their accounts, and avoiding personal information being shared such as their birthday or social security number.
The cybersecurity company said consumers should also look for “https” at the beginning of a website URL, which indicates a secure connection, and use credit cards rather than debit cards for online shopping, which offer better protection and less liability if stolen.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.
