u/blackdukewilder

This started because I kept running into a problem where I would read about Blackbeard and then read about Hornigold, and I could never hold in my head who was actually at sea at the same time, who sailed with who, or how short most of these accounts really were.

Wikipedia has those cool horizontal timeline charts for band lineups where you can see at a glance that this guitarist overlapped with that drummer for a couple of years. I wanted that for the golden age, and I couldn't find one, so I made it.

It's 36 entries from Roche Braziliano in 1654 to William Fly in 1726. Each one gets a bar showing the years they were actually on the account, coloured by where they were at, with marks for big events. You can sort the whole thing chronologically, by how long they lasted, or by how it ended for them. There's a map of where each one went, and clicking a name opens a little biography.

On sources, I've tried to be careful about what comes from where. However, i'm certain there are errors in it. If you spot one I'd genuinely rather know. I'm not a historian after all.

I've been obsessed with cyberpunk since I was a kid, and somewhere along the way I realized the genre had been working through serious philosophy the whole time, simulation, the constructed self, reality as something rendered rather than given, fictions that harden into systems nobody can opt out of. Gibson's "consensual hallucination" is a thesis. The genre was thinking about this stuff for fun decades before I encountered the actual theory behind it.

I ended up writing a short book about it, an essay tying together Baudrillard, the idea that there's no stable self under the hood, and the way beliefs become real by being acted on, with a closing piece on how cyberpunk got there. I'm the author, so take that for what it's worth, but I made the whole text free and public domain, and there's a free audiobook too, so I'm not here to sell anyone anything. The link has all of it.

Mostly I'm curious what this sub thinks: which cyberpunk works hit the philosophy hardest for you? The ones that stuck with me weren't always the most action-heavy, they were the ones that made the constructed nature of everything feel real.