Some few years ago, I used to play a RPG from R. Talsorian games called Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., known to the faithful as C-punk 2K20. It was based on the writings of Bill Gibson and other cutting edge science fiction authors who looked at the world, what was happening and where it could go.
Their prognostications were dark and cassandran, full of corruption and greed, where human life was cheap and easily wasted. They predicted the rise of a corporate elite, and their mercenary armies.
They, and the RPGs that they spawned, foresaw a place where people turned away from reality, lured into computer 'cyberspace', willfully cutting themselves off from the rest of humanity. The city streets were haunted by broken military veterans and rebellious rockers while the gleaming glass towers held sararimen who had sold their souls to climb the corporate ladder.
It seems that they were more right than they could have ever predicted.
Over the weekend, the G-20 met in Pittsburgh, where the economic elite met to decide how the looting of what was left of the world economies would proceed. Outside, the common people had been herded behind 'security' barriers, their sheeplike minds programmed by the media that terroristic protestors would descend on their homes and shop fronts like maddened locusts, smashing and destroying their hard work. The downtown core was emptied by decree.
Instead, it was the Pittsburgh police, bolstered by testosterone fueled 'volunteers' from across the country, and assisted by 25oo National Guardsmen recently returned from tours of duty in Iraq who committed acts of violence and brutality.
Even before the G-20 meeting had begun, protestors had their phones and e-mails tapped and intercepted, the leaders harassed and preemptively arrested. A bus carrying food for the protestors was stopped repeatedly and searched for non-existent weapons. People on the street were stopped because they matched a nebulous police profile of what a 'protestor' looked like. Legal requests to hold a protest march were denied out of hand for no reason.
And it gets worse.
During the actual meeting, brave souls who dared to enforce their rights were met by hundreds of heavily armed police. The protestor were unarmed, mostly young and college students. In every case they were herded away from the G-20 meetings, forced into side streets, then ordered to disperse. If they did not flee fast enough, the police turned on them. Sometimes there would be black masked renegades, dressed to look like 'anarchists', but very likely police agent provocateurs or informants, who would smash a few window when the crowds were near concentrations of police, then conveniently 'escape' when the police closed in.
Truncheons, shotgun bean bags, rubber bullets, CS tear gas, pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, physical assault by the armored police officers. All were used against the unresisting protestors.
But the worst was the police use of the LRAD.
The LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device, is basically a loud speaker. In reality, it is a sound cannon, capable of delivering 150+ dB at a distance of 500 meters. The Pittsburgh police deployed them at 50 meters or less.
The LRAD is capable of causing permanent hearing damage in less than a second, and is deliberately tuned to a frequency that affects the inner ear, even if you have ear protection. At close ranges it can drop you in your tracks.
The Pittsburgh police used this weapon, which was field tested by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, and then by US forces in Iraq, indiscriminately on the streets of PIttsburgh. They were granted blanket permission by the city government.
Not only did the police attack the protesters, they also assaulted people in their homes, who happened to be watching the police actions from their balconies.
People who recorded police actions had their cameras and recordings seized or destroyed by the police. The police also assaulted passers-by whop were in no way involved with the protests.
So what, do you ask, does this have to do with roleplaying?
Well, everything that was written as fiction fifteen years ago is coming true.
The future is closer, and darker, than you think.
