Entries tagged with “Cyberpunk” from Things You Don't Care About

"The body's in here, detective -- manager said another renter complained about the smell, so he opened it up and found the body.  Called us right away," explained the uniform, leading us towards the cluster of squad cars and the coroner's van.

The smell as we walked into the small self-storage facility nearly had me putting my lunch on the ground -- this guy had been dead a while, no doubt about it.  From the looks of things, he hadn't come to a very pleasant end, either.  His neck had been slashed from ear to ear, though there didn't seem to be nearly enough blood for him to have been completely exsanguinated.  Decomposition had been at work for a while and it looked like this place had a rat problem.

"Christ.  Fucking freaks," I heard Chance mutter.  Under the rotting corpse and the blood that was there, some sort of white chalk pentagram had been drawn, ringed with the "mystic" symbols that we'd started to see more and more the last couple years.  Used to be you could count on it all being a bunch of wannabes or deranged cultists, but these days, you never knew.

"You think that's bad, look up," said Paulsen, the forensics geek.  He pointed up towards the ceiling, where someone had painted another strange symbol, nearly two meters across, in red paint.  Except it wasn't paint.

"Jesus.  The Feds are going to be all over this one.  You got an ID on this guy?"  I didn't expect that anyone had found his wallet, but if we got lucky and he'd been fingerprinted at some point.

"Working on a DNA match, but so far nothing.  I'd put time of death at at least three or four days ago, but I'll know more once I get him back to the lab."

Any reader of this blog has probably figured out that I'm a big fan of Shadowrun, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year (and I finally broke down and bought 4th Edition -- I'll be getting one of the numbered Limited Edition hardcovers when they are released (I assume around GenCon, though no actual street date has been announced).  I haven't played the game in a long time, and to be honest I'm not too fond of the direction the new edition took with the setting -- it's much more Ghost in the Shell these days than Neuromancer -- but I still have a lot of fondness for the game, and for the people who write it.  I would really like to get back to the game again.

My favorite period in the canon Shadowrun timeline is around 2055, the tail-end of the Dowd/Findley heyday that I've talked about before.  However, one period I've always thought I'd love to try running a game in is the period right as the world is still coming to grips with all the changes of the Awakening.  Magic is still relatively new and strange, the Matrix is just coming online, elves and dwarves are starting to come into adulthood and orks and trolls have been around for barely a decade.  The megacorporations are still solidifying their positions and the old order is making its last stand, as the Eurowars rage.

To steal a trick used by NSDM's Cold War scenarios, here's some comparisons between 2032 and today.  In 2032:

• VITAS I killed 25% of the world's population about as long ago as AIDS became prominent in the public consciousness.
  
• The Awakening happened about as long ago as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  
• The Treaty of Denver happened about as long ago as Bill Clinton's second presidential election victory.
• Orks and trolls have been around about as long as Google.
• Lone Star has been in charge of Seattle's police about as long as the United States has been in Afghanistan.
• Magic has been a field of serious, practical study about as long as China has had a manned space program.
• Cyberterminals have been around a little longer than the iPhone.
• The Crash of 2029 happened about as long ago as the 2006 Lebanon War.
  
• The UCAS was formed about as long ago as Nancy Pelosi became the Speaker of the House.

It might just be the fact that I'm rewatching the first couple seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street lately, but I think it'd be really cool to run a police procedural sort of campaign in this period, with the players playing homicide cops during a time of change.  I'm not sure I'll ever get to, but I think I might try playing with the idea some and writing some fiction set in that period, if nothing else.  I've been toying with the idea for quite a while, and this is sort of a way to keep me from letting myself forget about it too much.

So over the last few weeks I've been watching a fair bit of movies and TV simply because I have to spend about 4 hours a day lying in bed doing nothing.  In addition to watching all of the commentaries and extra features in my Freaks and Geeks boxed set (which, by the way, is well worth it -- I'm still horribly disappointed I never caught it when it was first airing and that it got canceled), I upped my Netflix subscription to two movies at a time to try and fill the hours.

The first bunch of DVDs I got were the third season of Forever Knight.  I'm more than willing to admit that the first two seasons of the show were a lot cheesier than I remembered (though I don't really regret having them on DVD), but the third season really struck me as a very Silk Stalkings-ified version of the show when I saw the first few episodes on USA (and promptly gave up on it, after staying up at weird hours to watch the second season).  I figured I might as well watch to see if it was as bad as I thought (and see the last episode, which I had never seen).  On the whole, it ended up being probably a little better than what I expected, but I think it was definitely still a big step down from the first two seasons, which had quite a few episodes that were far better than the usual late night syndicated junk.  Probably the worst change was the loss of John Kapelos and Deborah Duchene (Schanke and Janette) for Lisa Ryder and Ben Bass, something that always struck me as kind of a lowest-common-denominator move.  And the last episode was....well, really pretty disappointing and a definite downer.

That was followed, however, by probably the best find I've come across in quite a while, No Maps For These Territories, a documentary that's basically an hour and a half discussion with William Gibson on his writing, information age society, futurism, and a variety of other topics while he rides around in the back of a limo.  If you are a big Gibson fan (and I am), you will probably enjoy it; if you aren't that interested in William Gibson, there's no reason for you to see this movie (well, duh).  He talks about almost every aspect of his life, and his discussion of Neuromancer was especially interesting for me, going a long way towards explaining why it is so different from most of his other books.  I'll probably end up buying this one actually, simply because I didn't get enough time to really digest the movie or the associated extras (including more interview snippets that didn't make it into the body of the movie itself).  The only thing I can say is that the movie is made in such a way that it is a little more "artistic" than it had to be for me, since I was mostly interested in what he was saying and not the visuals of the movie.

The next on this list is Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone.  Honestly, if I hadn't been told that this was his first movie as a director, I would never have known.  Almost every aspect of the movie is done in a way that really shows a good eye for the camera and for getting the actors to really bring their characters to life.  I suspect that the fact that the movie takes place (and was shot in) Affleck's hometown of Boston helped contribute to this in the same way it did with Good Will Hunting; many of the people in this movie are simply residents of the Boston neighborhood where it was being shot.  The plot is well-written, and while I may agree slightly with Chesnut, who said it seemed a little convoluted for his tastes, I did not feel like the "twists" were just thrown in to be twists -- each one highlighted the moral choices the characters had to make.  Really, without them, the movie would not have been worth making because those twists are in the movie to highlight the central point.  I highly recommend seeing this movie, though I will say it will probably not leave you with a good feeling at the end.

Michael Clayton is a movie that probably won't leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling at the end either, but it too is a good movie.  Unlike Gone Baby Gone, though, this film feels a bit more formulaic and not nearly as authentic (but maybe it wasn't trying to be).  The performances, by George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, and Tilda Swinton most notably, were as good as I'd expect from actors of that caliber, and the writing for each scene was well done, but the plot that holds it all together, as Chesnut wrote in his capsule review, seems kind of like Another Lawyer Movie.  Still worth watching, though, and I think the actors and writers probably deserved their Oscar nominations, but on the other hand, I am glad that it didn't win the Best Picture Oscar, though so far I've only seen one of the other nominees.

Last for this installment was The Golden Compass, which I just watched the other night.  Obviously made as a Narnia-like attempt to cash in on the Lord of the Rings' success (which doesn't necessarily make it bad), this suffers from the fact that it feels like half of a movie and there was no guarantee the other half was going to get made.  The film's climax seems like should be about where the Mines of Moria scene was in Fellowship, but instead it ends with the film's real conflict hanging in the wind.  That being said, I didn't think the movie was really bad, it just felt like it fell short of what it was trying to be.  The CGI, which was a large part of the movie, was competently done, and for the most part looked real, and I liked the sort of Victorian steampunk style aesthetic.  It sounds like the sequel is still going to be made (largely due to its strength overseas, it sounds like), so maybe I'll like it more with the next part.  I was disappointed by how bare-bones the DVD is though; there's no commentary, no deleted scenes (and I know there were quite a few), no behind the scenes stuff.  For a movie like this, you'd think there'd at least be a little of that on the DVD, but maybe with the perceived failure of the movie at the box office no one wanted to put any money into it. 

It's been almost two weeks since the last installment of the Caldari Dialogues, and I apologize for the delay.  This is the last installment of the original batch I had planned, so any further installments will probably be spun off of discussions about these articles and not from that original conversation with Yoshito and Kai (by the way, if you haven't seen Kai's new site yet, The Zion Chronicles, you should check it out).

In this part, I'll be talking about the other 10-20% of the Caldari population -- the people who, either by choice or by circumstance, have found themselves on the outside of the corporate system.  These are the people that have conventionally been the heroes (or antiheroes) of cyberpunk literature and RPGs.  They live in the shadows of the rest of society, living on their crumbs and cast offs, or trying to scramble back into the system that has left them behind.  So, without further adieu, let's get to the main event.

So I've been meaning to do at least a couple short reviews on a few of the books I've read recently, but I just haven't had the time to really sit down and write out my thoughts on them.  I'm finally going to get around to this, and I apologize if they are a little vague; I left this go a bit too long and some of the details are a little fuzzy now.

Spook Country is first on the list.  William Gibson's latest, I saw it getting good reviews on RPGnet and decided to pick it up and try to figure out why I hadn't read anything by him in ages.  As I said before, Spook Country really felt like returning to a literary home for me; despite the fact that the book takes place in 2006, it is undeniably a cyberpunk book, and focuses on many of the same themes that are touched on in Neuromancer and his other books.  The writing style is very similar to what I remembered from the Sprawl trilogy, and as with everything I've read from him from Count Zero on, the book is constructed from multiple points of view that start out separate and slowly come together at the end.

While I have a harder time really describing too much what the story is about, simply because it encompasses so many themes, the one thing that seems to unify most of the plotlines in the book is the way technology, especially the internet, has intertwined with daily life in a way that is both similar and completely diferent from what Gibson envisioned in Neuromancer.  Gone are the neon cities, replaced with GPS and near-ubiquitous wireless networks that make things like locative art possible.  Buried somewhere in there is an espionage plot that touches on the kleptocracy of Iraq and the overreaching national security apparatus of the United States, but I get the feeling that is more of a medium in which Gibson is trying to use to explore these other concepts.

So, after reading Spook Country and really enjoying it, I decided to pick Virtual Light back up and try to figure out why I never really got into it when I first tried reading it (which must have been near when it was first published, back in 1993-94).  This time, I didn't have any problem getting into the book, and I am a bit baffled as to why I didn't like it when I tried before.  It didn't seem that much different, at least in style, from Neuromancer, with a much more straightforward action plot than Spook Country (though it doesn't start out that way).

I thought it was interesting that Gibson's three trilogies have been more and more contemporary as technology and society have become closer and closer to what he envisioned in his earlier works.  Virtual Light was especially interesting in the fact that when he wrote the book, it took place 12 years in the future, and when I was reading it, it took place 3 years in the past.  Gibson doesn't get the future quite right, of course, but it still rings pretty true and the book is filled with the immersively real places I've comes to expect from him -- the Bridge, the strange curio shop Berry looks into a job at, the messenger services offices, the party Chevette steals the VR glasses at, and the trailer community for the television oracle religious commune, for a few examples.

For some reason, the Bridge especially appeals to me.  In large part, I think that is because the Bridge is a community and a place built upon a historical artifact but also molded by the very people that live there, a fusion of old construction and new, one that feels very lived in and homey despite its obviously fragile and grungy state.  It's one reason that having a loft in a warehouse or some other reclaimed building appeals to me; it feels less artificial, more natural -- like a cave reclaimed from the wilderness, and certainly not sterile.

The plot of the novel also touches on this -- the hacker group that screws Berry over in the beginning of the novel and who saves him in the end is prompted to act to defend San Francisco, a place at least some of them call home and which also has that same aspect of being a new city built on the bones of the old, organically grown -- in contrast to the city that Sunshine wants to construct, which is going to be carefully sculpted from the ground up (despite the fact that it actually is going to be grown, by nanotechnology -- this is an artificial growth, not a natural process).  Once again, Gibson's plot is not nearly as gripping as the details and themes he explores.

The last book on this hit parade is Freakonomics, which I've wanted to read ever since I saw one of the authors, economist Steven Levitt, talking about it on the Daily Show a few years ago, but I never really got around to it.  My brother got it for Christmas a while back and I finally got around to borrowing it last weekend.  It's a quick (and for a book on economics, rather light) read, and it is probably one of the most interesting and thought-provoking books I've ever read.  I don't know that I really buy the "these are just the fact, you can take them as you will" tone that Levitt and Dubner try to set, at least entirely, but it does a good job of backing up the assertions it makes with facts and examples, so you can at least look into what they are saying if you want.

The best part of the book for me was how they tied in all sorts of anecdotes into wider studies and examples that push you to think just that much harder about the "common sense" things you pick up over your lifetime.  They also approach things very analytically, at least supposedly without any agenda or bias, which appeals to my brain (and, perhaps somewhat egotistically, it's what I think the "Caldari mindset" is), and it can lead to some seriously disturbing conclusions -- that all the innovative policing in the world matters less than legalized abortion, for instance (though the upshot of that chapter would seem to be that any method for preventing the birth of unwanted children would be beneficial).

It's not going to be the kind of book that changes the way you live your life, but it might make you think about things you wouldn't have otherwise questioned.  Well worth a read, even if you aren't that interested in economics (I found the stories about the way the KKK was undermined and the analysis of the Black Gangster Disciples business operation to be extremely interesting on their own).  And, if you want more from the authors in the same vein, they have a blog on the New York Times website.

The third article in this series will examine the lives of the average Caldari, the 80-90% of the population that makes up the wheels and gears of the Caldari State and its corporations.  This chapter is going to pull from many of the same sources as the previous one, as well as a few other books that highlight the situation on the ground, as it were.  The biggest example is the Sprawl Survival Guide, another excellent Shadowrun soucebook.  While most of that focuses more on the specifics of that universe, it also includes a great many good examples of how corporations stay in control over the populace.

The biggest thing to take from this chapter will be that for most people in the State, life is fairly good, at least to them.  This is not because the corporations are particularly generous, or even care that much about the people that work for them, but because the corporations have conducted a centuries-long marketing campaign to promote themselves as the friend of the average man or woman and maintain the level of discontent at a minimum.  After all, workers that despise their jobs or, at an extreme, believe that they have nothing to lose from a violent strike, do not do good jobs and cost companies millions or billions of ISK in lost productivity (or even deliberate sabotage).

So with that summary, let's move on to the real meat of the article.

For the second installment of the Caldari Dialogues, I'm going to be taking a look at the corporations of the Caldari State: where they came from, how they operate and compete, their objectives and how they work to accomplish them.  From here on out, we'll be talking about the modern Caldari State, at least as it was prior to May of this year; the events with Tibus Heth have been, in my opinion, rather contradictory to everything that came before, so I'm going to avoid talking about them.  This article series is, to be quite honest, intended to explain my problems with those events in terms of plausibility, so that shouldn't be too huge a surprise for anyone.

I'll be relying on a couple of sources for a lot of my references in this chapter.  The primary one is going to be Corporate Shadowfiles, the superb Shadowrun sourcebook written by the late Nigel Findley, one of my role models as a game designer and fiction writer.  This book includes a number of things that people interested in the State will find supremely useful, including a discussion how modern corporations are structured and operate, various methods of corporate competition, and a number of Shadowrun-specific notes on various incidents between megacorporations that can give a great deal of insight on what probably happens in a similar cyberpunk setting like we find in the State.  This book is an excellent primer on corporate capitalism that is not only extremely well-researched and informative, but an excellent and interesting read.

Other references and influences include the Mekong Dominion Leaguebook for Heavy Gear, a well written sourcebook about a society on Terra Nova structured very much like the Caldari State, Blade Runner, Max Headroom, the collected works of William Gibson (especially the Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy), and I'm sure a zillion other things I can't remember right now.  Basically, my ideas about the State are very rooted in the cyberpunk genre, which is something that I think CCP definitely had in mind when they were developing the State.

So without further adieu, let's move on.  The body of the article continues behind the cut.

Last week, I ordered two books from Amazon with my latest gift certificate, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Spook Country by William Gibson.  I read the PKD book first, since I have had trouble piercing a lot of Gibson's books in the past, ever since I read the sequels to Neuromancer.  It was good -- interesting at least, though it ends very abruptly and is as indecipherable as anything written by Dick.  A good effort at world building though, with a lot of interesting philosophical questions, something that I have pretty much come to expect from Dick's writing.

I started Spook Country this morning, and wow.  I haven't read anything by Gibson since I tried starting Virtual Light a long time ago and never managed to finish it.  I keep meaning to go back and reread Neuromancer again, but I haven't had the chance (and I can't find my copy -- I think I might have loaned it to someone).  However, just reading the first two chapters of Spook Country I remembered why I think he's such an amazing writer.  He has such a skill with metaphor, such an attention to detail and description, that it blows my mind just to think about.  When he describes something, he talks about it in a way that you would never think to describe it, but you can instantly picture what he means.  If he is able to do this reflexively, if that is how things just come to him, than I am supremely envious.  To me, it seems like each paragraph is perfectly crafted, like delicate etched glass, painstakingly designed and cut for hours or days.

Gibson's writing can be dense and sometimes impenetrable; like I said, I tried reading Virtual Light and I haven't managed to do so successfully yet.  His plots are sometimes so labyrinthine that you have to reread them a half dozen times before you really understand what's going on and his characters can sometimes be complete enigmas. Even so, there is no question, at least to me, that he is one of the best writers I have ever read.  Regardless of what you may say about him, you can't deny that every book he writes feels real, like he's just describing a scene that he is watching, one with infinite resolution -- you could read the fine print on every warning label, feel the ridges and cracks in every piece of grubby plastic, taste the ozone in every breath of air.  I almost feel like his current books, which are set in more or less the present day, are almost a waste of his talent.  I want to read about something new and different, completely separated from what I know and yet intimately familiar.  For me, as a writer, that is the ultimate challenge, and when someone can pull it off with such apparent ease, I have to simply sit back in awe.

I'm usually pretty wary of most attempts to undermine the popularity of stuff like YouTube or other "upstart" websites by established media companies; usually they end up being pretty lame or at least critically gimped in some way.  However, after having both benoc and Deidei mention watching a few things on hulu.com, I checked it out just to see how it was, especially because Deidei was trying to get me to watch Kitchen Confidential (vaguely based on Anthony Bourdain's book, which I really liked).  So I checked it out this weekend, since it's easy enough to leave a webpage open while I play Eve in another window or something.

Surprisingly enough, it doesn't suck too bad.  You are forced to watch brief commercials at certain points; this isn't horrible, since most shows would have them anyway and the commercials are only 15-30 seconds.  The only time it gets a little annoying is when it's a show that was originally shown on pay cable, like Total Recall 2070, where the commercial breaks can come at odd moments.  Furthermore, the selection of shows is surprisingly good.  I knew that it was a joint venture between NBC and FOX, but I forgot how many shows on other networks are done through them, and the catalog of old shows is surprisingly good as well.  They don't have full catalogs of all the shows there, but especially the one-season shows that were cancelled (like Firefly) they have there, which is nice if you wanted to see a show you heard about but didn't see, and don't want to take a chance on buying the DVDs (or the DVDs aren't available).

So far, I've gone through all of Kitchen Confidential (which was okay -- it was definitely better having read the book and being vaguely familiar with the craziness in a restaurant kitchen) and Total Recall 2070, which I only saw a few episodes of when it was in syndication.  It's worth checking out if you have some time to kill and you're bored.

So another Christmas has come and gone, spent as usual with my brother, his girlfriend, and my parents at their house.  Now, while I'm admittedly not exactly the target market for this holiday, I don't think you need to be Christian to be able to appreciate a time like this, where you can gather with family and celebrate the fact that everyone's made it through another year, enjoy some good food and good company, and just generally have a good time.  Christmas is probably the time of year when I most feel at home with my parents, when my house feels the most empty.  Sitting on the couch at my parents' house, in front of a roaring fire, with the Christmas tree decorated and everyone there, together, that's a feeling of contentment I get far too little.  It's a sense of connection to my past, and when I move away, as I know I will eventually, that's going to be one of the hardest things to adjust to if I can't come home for Christmas.

This year was a little odd, since my mom had surgery on her wrist in October and as a result hasn't been able to really decorate the house as she usually does; her Halloween Department 56 miniatures are still up for instance, which is a bit weird.  Still, I think it may have actually been good for her because she wasn't stressed out about getting everything up and making it perfect, which I know can have a tendency to creep up on her sometimes.  My dad did more of the cooking this year than he usually does (which is saying a lot, since this is the time of year he does most of his baking) and despite his cinnamon rolls not turning out quite like he wanted, he really outdid himself.  I think the eggnog this year was the best it's ever been, the smoked ham we had yesterday was amazing, and everything was just really good.  The food at my folks' is one of those things I always look forward to, especially on the holidays, and I definitely wasn't disappointed.  The only thing that really bothered me is that I wasn't able to help as much as I would have liked because I was waiting for the mail to arrive here at my house on Monday, because a few of my presents still hadn't arrived yet (they made it, finally, at 5:00).

And of course, there's the presents.  This is always kind of an iffy thing for me, because my mom, as much as I love her, still hasn't really quite figured out what I like even after thirty years, and my transition has only made that worse in some ways I think.  While I can usually appreciate the sentiment (except the year she gave me the gift of cleaning implements, which I interpreted as "your bathroom needs to be cleaned better"), it's often stuff I am never going to use.  My dad usually does better, but I think it's hard for either of them to really bridge the generation gap sometimes.  However, overall, this year, they really outdid themselves for the most part.

Definitely the highlight of the day was the Blade Runner Ultimate Collector's Edition, which is, quite frankly, the best single-movie boxed set I've ever seen.  Not only does it have the new "Final Cut," which is still pretty close to the 1992 Director's Cut with cleaned up effects and a significantly better transfer, it has the 1992 Director's Cut, the US theatrical release, the international theatrical release, and the previously unreleased workprint that was circulated as a bootleg for a while I guess.  But that's not all, oh no.  For me, the highlight of this boxed set is the three and a half hour making-of documentary Dangerous Days.  We watched the Final Cut and this documentary yesterday, and frankly, it just blew me away.  Seeing how they did all those effects and how they built those amazing sets, all the wrangling over the script, and all the other growing pains that that movie went through, you really get a sense for how much people just poured into this movie to make it as good as it is.  Honestly, I don't know if I will ever see another movie made in my lifetime that will reach the scope and vision that Blade Runner achieved; I don't think it's out of the question to put it there with movies like Citizen Kane as a triumph of cinema.  In addition to the monstrous documentary, there's a number of other featurettes I haven't had time to watch yet.  If you're a true fan, this five disc set is a must-buy, especially at only 55 bucks from Amazon.  Considering the last Limited Edition didn't last in stock too long, you might want to grab it while you have a chance.

I got plenty of other goodies too, of course; the Serenity Collector's Edition, a few Call of Cthulhu books (which will be handy for working on Cthulhu Rising), Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!), a collection of t-shirts and posters from the Valve Store from my brother (sadly, he wasn't able to get one of the plush headcrabs, a deficiency I took care of last night myself), one of Johnny Cash's American Recordings CDs and Santana's Abraxas from my dad, in an effort to expand my musical tastes (I suspect inspired by Guitar Hero), and vast array of other assorted knickknacks.

As far as the title for this entry goes, it was my brother's girlfriend's question to my mom about the fact that her nativity scene does in fact have four wise men.  Evidently this is something she inherited from her mother and no, she has no idea where the fourth (very out-of-place looking) wise man comes from.  It's not a Catholic thing, it's....a my family is a little odd thing, as if that should be a surprise to anyone at this point. :)

So for some reason -- perhaps it was the Art of Noise cover of the Peter Gunn theme on Radio Nigel, or the fact that this week is premiere week for TV's fall season, or just leftover nostalgia from last night, but I was reminiscing about probably my favorite show to ever air, Max Headroom.  While I never got to see the show when it was originally on (I was only 10, and it was on past my bedtime, you see), when Bravo started showing the episodes when I was in high school I would watch them all when they aired at some ungodly hour.  Coincidentally, that was also when I was getting into cyberpunk something fierce (especially Shadowrun), so the show managed to pretty much hit me at exactly the right time.  I do remember media saturation with the title character during the mid-'80s though, thanks to the Coke ads and other appearances (like the homages to Max in Back to the Future II).

It was probably the best -- if not the only good -- depiction of a cyberpunk future I've seen on TV, even to this day.  It had everything -- giant megacorporations that controlled the fate of nations, a populace lulled into ignorance and complacency by mass media, people living on the edge, trying to maintain an existence free from government and corporate intrusion, police more subservient to corporate law than the people, a massive, all-encompassing computer network, and almost every other cyberpunk trope you can think of, short of actual cyberware.  It was treated like a serious subject (Max's witty banter aside) and brought up issues that have sadly become closer and closer to reality as time has worn on (as pointed out in the Wikipedia article on the show).

I suspect Matt Frewer, Amanda Pays, Jeffery Tambor, W. Morgan Sheppard, and Chris Young will always be Edison, Theora, Murray, Blank Reg, and Bryce Lynch to me, and I wonder when they are going to finally release this show on DVD -- I, and I suspect many others, would pick it up in a heartbeat.   Sadly, I don't think there's any plans to do so, nor does there seem like much chance of any sort of revival project; let's face it, Max is and always will be a part of the '80s, even if it feels like we're rapidly becoming the world that was depicted there.  Ironically, Bryce Lynch was supposedly born in 1988, which means that Max Headroom takes place somewhere around 2004 or 2005, placing the show that was once 20 minutes into the future into the box full of retrofutures that includes flying cars, moon bases, and sentient computers.