At least in part because anyone with any judgment would realize that Bouie asking Douthat about *anything* would elicit a response akin to Elon's response to Rogan when he asked how Mamdani is a "swindler".

especially because I could legitimately be called "post-liberal", as someone who drifted into left-liberalism in my 20s and 30s and then decided it was time to recommit to anarchism and communism during Bush II & Obama

And the NYT leadership would never those two to engage.

The real crime was not nominating a Gundam. Most of the EVAs have like imprisoned souls in them and also require internal power, and are also not named cool things like Aerial or DEATHSCYTHE

That, combined with SAC's insistence on creating a cishetero backstory for the Major, is why Innocence is my pick from the GitS animeverse. The Major is off doing whatever she's doing, but she's pretty obviously no longer a cop, and Batou is mostly operating outside the framework of the law.

4. And, again, if you treat Kyubey's interventions as sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, the Soul Gems are a very direct psychic and bodily intervention of technology.

I'm not being entirely serious, but you can make it work without too much distortion, I think.

For me the main things are

1. Suffering and despair as surplus value is an on the nose metaphor for capitalist exploitation IMO.
2. The witches' domains as cyberspaces.
3. Madoka's transcendence into the Law of Cycles replaces one system of total control with a more liberatory alternative.

If you think about cyberpunk in terms of being about systems of control or capitalist colonization of the mind and body, it’s probably one of PSYCHO-PASS or Innocence. I kinda want to do some lateral thinking and argue for Madoka, though, because of its ending and also what Kyubey represents.

I agree with your general sentiments, but AI (at least LLMs, but, to an extent, everything built on ML) is notoriously terrible at mathematics, both in terms of not being able to accurately do simple arithmetic and also in terms of being bad at the forms of induction and deduction used in proofs.

is there anything as good as the bowling alley scene?

I recommend exposure therapy via Hidamari Sketch, a cute and moderately gay slice of life show based on a manga by Mafoka’s character designer, where they aggressively lampshade the wide heads.

also it’s really good

Serious question: isn’t Shadowrun quintessentially cyberpunk?

Another thing about Madoka that gives it a cyberpunkish vibe to me is the presentation / background art. Shaft regularly gets wacky with their set designs, but the sterile tech modernism and superflatness of the non-Witch world seems very intentionally artificial in a Baudrillardian way.

That, combined with SAC's insistence on creating a cishetero backstory for the Major, is why Innocence is my pick from the GitS animeverse. The Major is off doing whatever she's doing, but she's pretty obviously no longer a cop, and Batou is mostly operating outside the framework of the law.

4. And, again, if you treat Kyubey's interventions as sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, the Soul Gems are a very direct psychic and bodily intervention of technology.

I'm not being entirely serious, but you can make it work without too much distortion, I think.

For me the main things are

1. Suffering and despair as surplus value is an on the nose metaphor for capitalist exploitation IMO.
2. The witches' domains as cyberspaces.
3. Madoka's transcendence into the Law of Cycles replaces one system of total control with a more liberatory alternative.

look, as long as they leave Kumamon alone until I make it to Kumamoto next month I’ll be OK

But maybe Madoka better supports a reading as a combination Calvinist / Lovecraft Mythos text.

If you think about cyberpunk in terms of being about systems of control or capitalist colonization of the mind and body, it’s probably one of PSYCHO-PASS or Innocence. I kinda want to do some lateral thinking and argue for Madoka, though, because of its ending and also what Kyubey represents.