Hate Your Meat?

DISCLAIMER: THIS BLOGPOST FEATURES IMAGES OF REAL ADVERTISEMENTS. I DO NOT ENDORSE ANY PRODUCTS DISPLAYED ON HERE AND ALL IMAGES ARE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.

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I've seen a few video essays about this subject in particular, and they're definitely wonderful, so I'm linking them here:

The Genius Absurdity of Cyberpunk's Ads

Cyberpunk 2077 in a World of Ads

In a world of extreme poverty, addiction, horrible crime rates, mass destruction of the ecosystem, and a chance you could die just for looking at a cop wrong, what kind of advertisements would convince you to buy a product?

 Within the world of Cyberpunk 2077 and the tabletop RPG that came before it, the worldbuilding plays a massive role in the way we immerse ourself in the game. At it's core, Night City is a deeply depressive and self destructive city built literally on the radioactive ashes of its predecessor, who's development was taken over by those interested only in corporate and financial gain. Everything you look at within the world is designed to take something from you, whether it's your money, your body or your mental state. The towering buildings are covered in holographic advertisements, ads run in your home and possibly even in your very vision itself-- everyone is implanted with essentially Elon Musk's brain chip at the very least in order to function within the city. It's a high surveillance city, and the law enforcement is extremely corrupted.

And within this city, at all times, drowning out the constant gunshots, traffic, and people, is the sound of an ad that even the player begins to tune out:

Oooorgiiatic!

The tone of the advertisement is provocative in nature despite only selling a vitamin supplement. The explosion of flower petals simulates maybe an explosion of taste, or an explosion of sensation similar to... what happens when the birds and the bees love each other very much. It blasts throughout the city at all times of the day, even in your home, and is completely inescapable. What is it trying to tell you?

Many ads in Night City share a similar theme-- extremism. Whether they're using provocative imagery, displays of extreme violence, or the harsh contrast between what they're advertising and what you've currently got, they're trying to capture your attention with the in-world equivalent of clickbait thumbnails and mr beast videos.

 Beautiful, artistic ads are displayed in the Corpo Plaza corporate center of Night City, models placed elegantly to advertise a life of luxury that You Can Have, Too!

 However, even those in corpo plaza often have tiny studio apartments that cost 50,000 eddies to purchase ingame, and that's just on the outskirts. Many of the corporate workers are probably constantly chasing the glamour they've been promised while selling their own soul to the corporations they work at.

 Outside of Corpo Plaza the ads get direct, almost gruesome to look at-- they tell you that you'll never keep up at your job with those stupid, 'ganic arms, or maybe you just hate yourself! Everywhere you go, they're advertising your right to the second amendment-- no matter if you're a kid, pregnant, old, poor, or rich. You'll need to shoot that gun at some point, so get ours now!! But something even more disgusting lies in the advertisements that aren't trying to sell an item, but instead trying to fix your life.

When you first load into the game, it might be funny to laugh at the Orgiatic ad, or do a double take at the ads selling hard drugs & all the intense amounts of provocative advertisements that use human desire for pleasure to advertise their product to you, but after a few good hours of gameplay, you start to tune it out. The extreme nature of these ads is fun to look at, sure, but you've got chooms to meet and gigs to take and scavs to kill-- why look at the same NiKola ad you see on the elevator every day?

And then a few more hours of gameplay pass, and the ads start to resonate with you on a level you don't quite understand.

See, what I'm getting at here is that these ads tell a horrifying but beautifully developed story about the lives of the people who live here, and how ads develop when placed in a practically lawless and hyper-capitalistic society. The people here are a brutally realistic reflection of us, especially the USA, and how the people in this society are expected to utterly hate themselves. Whether it is the life they live, or how they look, or the jobs they have, nothing is EVER good enough. 

These ads are designed to appeal to your most carnal instincts, telling you to be selfish within a world that has almost nothing to offer you. Finally, you can be beautiful! Finally, you can protect yourself and your loved ones! Finally, you can survive! Sound familiar?

Everything in Night City is so... overstimulating. From the overtly sexual adverts and TV shows, to the bright and never-sleeping ambience of the city, and especially the existence of braindances which are essentially vr videos that can give you feelings of euphoria, fear, happiness, sadness, and experiences you'd never have in your own sad life all at once, the city leaves you addicted to the thrill and at the same time constantly needing more. The only thing that would grab your attention is something even MORE extreme, something that confuses you or shocks you in ways that make you stop, even for a second -- and with every provocative advertisement and exploding head you see, that gets harder and harder to accomplish.

The ads in Cyberpunk 2077 are exactly like the ads we see plastered across billboards, displayed on our tv screens, and before a YouTube video.

This is the fascinating and unsettling part. Within capitalism, the ads we see in Night City are just the natural course of advertisements! A majority of these ads aren't just there to shock you, they're not so ridiculous that they break immersion because we've seen these ads before, just in different ways, in our own lives. And I believe it is safe to assume that within the direction we are headed in society, they will continue to resemble one another until they're practically identical. We're already almost there.

The ads in Cyberpunk 2077 show us a reflection of ourselves when forced into the deepest corner of capitalism. This is a society that is always wanting more, because they need it.

What else is there to live for when you aren't able to consume in Night City? At the end of a brutal day at work, what else is there to do except put on your BD headset and forget reality? You don't often have real food because everything's either disease-ridden or extremely rare and expensive. You don't know whether you'll be able to make rent this month, your neighbor killed himself, a cyberpsycho destroyed the mall last friday and killed your best friend. The constantly displaying advertisements in your room just displayed an ad for a new implant that'll make your whole life better. Oh, and by the way, Do You Hate Yourself Yet?

These ads beautifully designed and honestly I could talk about each individual advertisement at length, but I don't think I've even seen them all yet!!

I hope this whole thing makes sense, because I have a lot of thoughts about it but very few ways to properly articulate them. Hopefully at least the ads looked cool! Here's a Link For More Cyberpunk 2077 Ads if you'd like to check them out.