Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄 is a user on elekk.xyz. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
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I saw elsewhere - perhaps Twitter - a criticism of the #cyberpunk idea, reflected in Cyberpunk 2077, that the unaltered human body is somehow sacred, and that augmenting it is profane. The criticism noted that this was, at its core, transphobic.
The critic then turned the idea on its head into a trans-positive cyberpunk that eschewed "humanity" in favor of "essence". Maybe one person's essence is complete when they're born; maybe another's essence is lacking until they augment themselves.
There are other deep criticisms of a view of #cyberpunk that insists that unaltered bodies are the only true humanity, too. E.g.: authors with this view tend to conflate increasing augmentation with a decrease in emotion, as though expressive emotion were innately human–never mind autistic people, people with flat affects, etc.
But I like the idea that the criticism offers - that augmentation allows a person to uncover their true self, rather than being limited by the body they were born with.
Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄
@noelle
One thing I notice in replies is that many people associate this with cyberpunk RPGs, and reasonably so - as noted, it's a mechanic that lets people with enhancements maintain rough parity with people without them. (I think there are better ways to do this, but that's outside the scope.)
It does show up in the fiction, though, too; I'm thinking specifically of two examples, "The Man who Bites His Tongue" from "A.D. Police Files" and "Robocop" (the original).
I'd forgotten that "A.D. Police" goes so far as to enshrine the loss of humanity in law: "...Leon reveals that should more than 70% of the human body becomes cybernetic, a citizen is treated as a 'boomeroid' and thus can be killed with the same prejudice as a boomer." (Boomers are self-aware robots who nevertheless have no rights in the setting.)
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@noelle Bubblegum Crisis and its spin off A.D. Police are inspired by Blade Runner which explains this value system.
In both BGC and Blade Runner you have a society who cannot cope with the idea of robots catching up with humanity in terms of sentience either due to conservative thinking or simply because it's more convenient to do so.
@noelle dragonfall
HBS's Shadowrun RPGs are really good for playing around with the idea that cyberware intrinsically "lessens" someone, with Glory auging herself up to cope with trauma and eventually overcoming the "Essence Loss" in her story arc
and Rachter positing through his experiments that neurodivergence is humanity evolving to be more compatible with cybernetic augmentation
It's worth noting that those examples have different approaches. "AD Police" has the title character begging for death because all the augmentation has made him inhuman. "Robocop" is more optimistic; the humanity has been actively programmed out of Murphy, and he regains it by the end of the movie.