Idle thought:
Cyberpunk narratives that paint body-modification as a negative thing because of "loss of humanity", are subtly transphobic because they associate essence with the physical body. That to modify the body is to negatively modify the mind.
It also presumes that to become less human is to also become less empathetic, whereas a person should be allowed to be non-human, or maybe even not a "person", without losing empathy and sapience.
meds
@Taylor nor does this consider the real life of people taking medicine to not space out forever or to not die due to the body not making what it should.
Or that post-furry is a thing, or that in a society with turing test passing AI would quite frankly throw out the term humanity in the first place to a term that can fill in for sapient and sentient beings capable of speaking with humans
@rrs Speaking of postfurry I hope our transhumanist future is furry-friendly and more interesting than just Human Robots everywhere. (And I don't trust SV to think beyond that.)
@Taylor they're also ableist (possibly more explicitly so, even), especially since so many cyberpunk game body mods are like. literally limb replacements which also literally exist already (unlike some other popular-in-cyberpunk augments)
@Taylor especially since abled people already act like using assistive devices somehow systematically strips away people's personhood.
and "natural abilities" are heavily fetishised, like how wheelchair users get pressured by doctors to not use a wheelchair just for the sake of legs doing locomotion instead of arms, regardless of other limitations that'd impose
there's definitely a lot of parallels with lots of aspects of self-determination, for sure
@Taylor it's residue from a "technology is bad" theme that gets washed out the second the game hands you a mountain of cool implants to be a walking tank