True story: google searching Cyberbears produces 99% gay porn. Disappointing.RobbyPants wrote:I totally read this as "cyberbears, couldn't figure out how that fit in context, and thought it was metal as fuck, anyway.Zaranthan wrote:Just that the road between "we can give deaf people some sort of audio sensation again" and "remember when people were scared of cyberears" isn't a ten minute walk.
The correct google search is "cyborg bear".
Anyway...
Fear is definitely going to be a big driving factor in how it all plays out. But capitalists are not just incentivized to spread fear of adopting new technology in order to sell page clicks, they are also incentivized to spread fear of not adopting the new technology in order to sell the new technology. The classic example would be circumcision, which became ubiquitous in the United States and Canada in the early 20th century because of a widely distributed theory that it would stop masturbation. Yes. That is the actual reason why more than half of all males in the US have part of their penises chopped off while less than one in thirty males in Europe do. Because of a masturbation scare in the 1900s.Zaranthan wrote:Your cybernetic future will have a long, LONG road of scared people being preyed upon by fearmongers (at least it will if it's supposed to seem familiar to people the way the world of Shadowrun is), and a good worldbuilder will spend some time writing up exactly how that predation played out in their world. Because it will shape the way the public views augmentations for decades afterward.
So you could have pretty much any piece of gadgetry become absolutely ubiquitous based on scare tactics that don't even make sense. Everyone has datajacks because people thought it made them less susceptible to basilisk hacks. It doesn't even matter whether it's true now or whether it was ever true. Once a form of augmentation becomes normalized, it's just normal and everyone gets one. Like how girls get their ears pierced because culturally that's just a form of body manipulation that girls do. Only it's like cyberears or some fucking thing.
-Username17