Brainstorming Reducing Silicon Slavery [Warning: Potentially Upsetting Topic!]

[Love]

Here is the short version:

Borgs can suicide and do not 'die', simply heading to a brief afterlife where they can be reconstituted as a meat-self or a borg-self in another shift.

Borgs can at any time asked to be monkey cloned. This is okay.

Borgs are only as 'unpaid' as you believe them to be. I think they get paid in lump sum post-shift because they don't need to buy much of anything during a shift, given they are power-reliant and not food, fluid or air reliant.

And finally, wowee it is super offensive to compare the wholly consensual state of being a cyborg in this game to the actual horrors of chattel slavery.

If that's how it is, then great!
Finding a way to make it clear that this is what is occurring is a totally valid and solid answer to my questing for solutions.

Because it is not clear that this is the case.

Both of my own suggestions basically boiled down to trying to dispel the idea that borgs do not receive pay, which is certainly implied due to them not receiving pay, nor being able to mechanically receive pay. If it's as simple as adding a few lines to a wiki page, or somewhere in game, again, a totally valid solution, not so different from mine.

I'm sorry that's offensive. I did try to make a warning that there might be ideas that would invoke bad feelings. There are a lot of horrible things that were also in the game that have since been removed, that implied or referenced horrible things, that we addressed. If I had pointed out a slur or an implied slur in a note or description somewhere in the game, which has happened several times, I do not expect I would have had admins telling me how offensive I was being by comparing a silly joke note to the actual horrors of centuries of racism. So I'm not sure why I deserved that here.

---

Please stop spreading this weird meta-narrative of cyborgs being slavery; that isn't in the lore, that isn't how it's talked about or justified in lore.

Cyborgs are machines. Robots. Programs. They use human brains, but are not humans. The PC you're using to make this post is not your slave.

Just like we ask you to not call sec "cops" and security arresting you "police brutality", this is a game, and we have game mechanics to encourage different gameplay styles and rp opportunities. If you overthink them, some of these mechanics can have parallels drawn between them and real life terrible things, but they are not those things, and it is unfair to your fellow player to force them to weigh gameplay considerations against the real suffering of real human beings.

I'm not trying to spread it?

The whole thread is trying to make it not be a thing.

We do actually seem to try to dispel the correlation of cops and security. Effort has clearly been made to that effect. Space law has been clarified to be a suggestion, and that Secoffs do not represent the rule of it, on the wiki. The name 'Security' itself is in-universe reinforcement that they are a private corporate security force, and not police. The wiki mentions that a lot of the normal happenings of law enforcement are lax in space. Punishments are generally minor, and the wiki is full of reminders that you should not do things like execute. Traditional police uniforms are rare to near nonexistence, and I've even heard people speak up against the one that does exist. And if someone posted a thread suggesting its removal, I think people would give it consideration.

Available information and lore are bent to make that offensive reality not a thing, or have no grounds to stand on.
All I'm suggesting is we do the same in this case. Let's try to make it clear! So we don't have this issue appearing over and over an over and over in game. So it doesn't appear, and so it's obviously not a thing, and not how things are. Because in this case, that's lacking. And mechanically, the opposite is true.

In regards to my PC not being a slave, my PC also doesn't talk to me, make jokes, determine its own course of action, express emotion through screaming at bees getting killed, or wearing cute smiling or sad faces, or projecting holograms of the same, or opening donut shops, or bring lunch to someone having a bad shift.

If borgs are supposed to be nonsapient and unable to have emotion, then okay, that's also a solution I would like to have heard, and making that clear is what we should aim to do. Though I think that one is very, very counter-indicated by everything in the game. And it would seem like trying to argue the 'Security are not cops' point while we hypothetically had security officers called 'Police Officers', carrying lethal firearms and modern police uniforms. It's a stance, and certainly a goal to work toward, but one that would take a lot more work to make a reality.

---

Latejoin SICC borgs and roundstart borgs likely don't need it, because, I mean, picking the job is pretty obviously consent to be a cyborg.

honestly kinda shocked that you wrote this and then still thought it was a good idea to write a whole fuckin thing positing that Borgs Are Intended To Closely Parallel An Oppressed Class anyways

I don't think that's intended. Or certainly hasn't been intended for as long as I've been in the game. Maybe at one point it was, back in the ancient days, where NT being some kind of Weyland-Yutani'ish evil corporation was more of a thing than today, where that's fallen out of favor.

I think you following this up with your own anecdotes running into this theme, and your discomfort with it, is not exactly what I'm suggesting we work to make Not a Thing, explicitly, and clearly. The people you mention would have no RP leg to stand on if being a borg required positive action to accept. Because you could point at an actual mechanical thing and say, 'You have to accept that to be a borg. You chose it'. That was the point of that suggestion. Likewise, the same could be pointed out to people crusading for borg liberation. Liberation from what? Every single one of them chose it, the proof is right there.

I make no claim about it being a good or the best suggestion (..quite the opposite..) which is why I asked for people to give ideas, in the hopes of rather more deft ones.