Cyberpunk's statement of a world where every breath is commodified couldn't be more vivid than in its description of advertisements, seeing them as an incessant holographic dominatrix, metaphorically beating one's will into submission from without and within. A word and phrase frequency count shows the most common words we use when writing about this:
Advertising (and variations), New, Street, Holo, City, Across, Entrance, Walked, Hand, Face, Commercial, Life, Neon.Combining these, the algorithm writes the most exemplary sentence:
He walked across the street, holo-commercials advertising a new life at the neon city entrance.
Take a look at how 20 top cyberpunk authors treat this issue:
Behind the prostitutes, A.I. noted my interest in the flesh trade and flashed brothel advertisements, the ads becoming more carnal as I walked past, with lurid images of every conceivable option and position tempting me to visit the bordellos. I blinked five times in quick succession, turning off my optics and terminating AR, not wanting to be distracted.
--Mark Harritt,
Entropy Angels
Across town in the seediest part of neoSoho the unstable figure of Cleric20 stumbles through the gathering dusk, he is trailed by his floating droid companion GiX which looks somewhat like an oblong slab of distilled neon thanks to the multiple adverts and info screen commercials reflecting off its polished anti-assault armour.
--Matt Adcock,
Complete Darkness
Holo ads blinked to life around him. A twenty-story movie star raising a glass of J&B on the rocks.
--D. L. Young. Cyberpunk City Book 1.
She glimpses a familiar shape, a hint of flowing robes that move against the current of the datastream that enfolds them, and tries to follow. But the crowding icons—balled advertising, jostling users, once a virtual pickpocket, groping for useful programs in other people’s toolkits—block her way... She bats the most persistent symbols idly away, feeling them break like bubbles against her hand: familiar advertising, most of them, some of them not, new names and faces, new services, strangers on the net. She drifts past, not bothering to make any reply, her own icon dimmed and ghostly in the midst of all that brilliance...
--Melissa Scott
(The Master of Cyberprose), Trouble and her Friends
“HackAd,” Burn said. “They are illegal, but no one cares to stop them out here.”
“So, what? That thing hacks my implant and targets an ad?” Moss asked though he knew the answer.
“You got it. Lots of folks have neural implants of one sort or another, so this type of advertising is popular. People who live here say you eventually tune it out, but we’ll get you some blockware.”
--Matthew A. Goodwin, Into Neon
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