TBH if there were not sensible discussions about the pros and cons of drugs [most of them started by Requiem] I would not stop here very long myself, and remain on .com; all this ”cybersex” stuff is really not what the original cyberpunks envisaged.
not because we are “old” now and disapprove of it, but it was never intended to take the place of people meeting each other in real life – perhaps forming long term friendships or relationships. nor was it intended to take place via networks heavily monitored by corporate brands and advertisers watching their every move.
as it is, real life in the modern world actually been severely negatively disrupted by online culture, I think it is worse for young people than the older ones who can remember how it was before “social” networking – but folk like me rarely get time to go out and socialise other than online because we are trying to keep vital stuff working against loads of wannabe “hackers” trying to disrupt things.
Even some of the links which are on here can turn out to be how innocent folk get their computers or other devices hijacked and used to start problems 500 or even 10 000 km away; eventually the Internet slowly fragments along national borders and/or governments eventually step in and lock everything down.
That was already the case in the early 1990s, I got in some trouble then for breaking through those barriers at University in London. it wasn’t that the Internet as we know it couldn’t have been available at least across Europe if not the World, (I found online an ASCII copy of an old hackers book I had from 1980s which had a big section about how computers in Europes science Universities were already linked up) – but those in the UK and USA who had the knowledge and controlled the resources in some countries had locked it down because they feared exaggerated threats from foreign lands (due to stuff from some hackers which was usually minor but in some cases did disrupt innocent people or cause unintended security risks) and/or they wanted to make money in preference to sharing info.
Thankfully folk in the Germanic and Scandinavian countries had (and still have) more sense – for those who are outside the UK and do not know this, the bit of England where Requiem lives is culturally much more like those countries than London or SE England.
