Dogtown made me see Night City with new eyes

I, like most inhabitants of Night City, thought the city was a dystopian hellscape since every aspect of life is controlled and preyed upon and monetized by massive corporations.

But Dogtown, that libertarian's paradise* within a libertarian's paradise**, is even more of a hellscape. Crumbled roads. Every 3rd building collapsed, the ones still standing left unfinished. Flames and fires in random corners. Everything imported from outside military-grade walls. No regular utilities like water or electricity unless hoarded or stolen. No working infrastructure whatsoever, except whatever helps the local warlord's army get around. Everyday life there, "Dogtown freedom", must be such a struggle, a different drain from your typical Night City corpo slavery.

Now back in Night City, where corporations reign supreme? Working roads! Air conditioning! Bills and debt sure, but you're not walled in. Yeah there are gangs below and corpos above, but there isn't martial law. Life is difficult but it is not unpredictable in its difficulty, and you can mitigate the worst of things, unlike when a random Barghest airdrop smashes your head from the sky.

It's quite a cautionary tale for us to avoid a world where society has largely ceded control over the resources and utilities needed for daily life to the benevolence of corporations. Without any functioning entity that provides essential services for basic survival, Dogtown shows how impossible it is to attempt to recreate a society from scratch independent of those corporations' assistance (and that assistance is entirely mercurial and to the whims of profit-seeking - they'll never pave roads and give electricity to the 8,000 Dogtownians out of altruism).

No matter what deals Dogtown tries to cut, its prospects are screwed without outside aid from systems of greater power - be they governments or corporations. This military coup can only pick at the scraps of abandoned corpo investments.

That said, after spending enough time in Night City's corpo drain on the body and mind, the chance to go out with a bang as an opportunistic nobody in Dogtown is going to feel enticing again. There will always be the allure of becoming one of the lucky few to rise above the odds, stick it to Barghest or work with them, and stand atop the Dogtown ruins as top dog (the odds of which are always overwhelmingly against you - unless you are V with V's insane luck and cool stats).

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* Dogtown's the outcome of an anticorpo reformation to oust and ban corporations from infringing on the freedoms of individuals. This post-oligopolistic reformation could've played out differently had it been enacted by a populist uprising or a laborers' revolution, but instead it came in the form of a military coup (as would be natural in a world where militarized corpos run things). So instead, the thin ideology of "everyone's freedom is absolute until it infringes on law and order, and that is a good thing" that Dogtown residents hold as cultural belief (Remember, Here > Shit > N.C.) is co-opted by the local warlord as an excuse to continue to exploit Dogtownians, as absolute freedom is a double-edged sword.

** Night City, the inevitable outcome of a libertarian system where people and corporations with the most wealth and status will aggregate their power as absolutely as possible when there is no higher authority or public accountability to regulate them (Imagine if the Silicon Valley crew created privatized company towns and ran rampant for a hundred years or so while Cali state and US federal law just shrugged their shoulders).