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"what they failed to capture is the dissonant tone of our modern dystopia"

I just reread Neuromancer and Count Zero, and the main thing I was struck by that Gibson didn't predict was today's omnipresent surveillance.

The people in his novels don't voluntarily carry around tracking devices and recoring devices. What they read and watch isn't tracked, and neither are their preferences or the opinions they express. They tend to have much more privacy than most people do today.

In this respect, I find today's society closer to 1984 than to Brave New World. It's 1984, complete with Newspeak, doublethink and Two Minutes of Hate for the boogeyman of the day, telescreens that combine televisions with security cameras and microphones what monitor what you do.

It's interesting that Gibson chose not to incorporate such dystopian themes in his books, and opted for what is in many ways a more optimistic dystopia.

You make a good point about surveillance, but I'd argue it's still more Brave New World, a dystopia built on consumerism, hedonism, and the compliance of the willingly oppressed over 1984's brutal, spartan, war economy. The citizens of Oceania may choose to buy into propaganda and nationalism, but they're also forced to by an all-powerful police state. The inhabitants of Huxley's World State certainly are subject to an oppressive state and brainwashing, but they also do so under far more comfortable circumstances. 1984 is motivated by pain, Brave New World is motivated by pleasure- I'd consider the latter to be closer to modern consumerist society.

I would assume Gibson simply didn't consider the technological ramifications of ubiquitous surveillance, or it's just his setup of a decentralized oppressive world of feuding megacorps and criminal super-gangs would have less thematic use for it than 1984's setup of one (or three) totalitarian governments able to monitor everyone.

That perspective is a bit Eloi; plenty of people are not doing well.

It isn't; a society can be dominated by emphasizing values of consumer-driven hedonism or social jockeying within castes (as in Brave New World) over totalitarian war and hatred (as in 1984), and still fall short of its aspirations.

Why not .. all of the above?

If this sort of thing scratches an itch you have, try Lawrence Sander's The Tomorrow File, from 1975. The author rather gleefully throws as many dystopian tropes into the mix as is feasible (and then a few more for good measure), and makes it work, oddly enough.

I think he missed wifi/cell phones, mostly. Had he thought of that, he would probably have explored these themes a bit more.

In Neuromancer there is an episode (second half, when they have already moved away from Earth surface) where a character is targeted by a sort of drone/service droid.

But I also sorta remember that in a subsequent story (I think it was Count Zero? Not sure anymore) one of the characters... cuts a videocall or something similar by actually yanking the cord out of the wall.

You're correct, it was in 'Count Zero'.

I had the same thought regarding surveillance. At the risk of sounding like devil's advocate, had Gibson accurately predicted the high-tech panopticon of the modern day, he could create a much better thematic environment by ignoring or downplaying it. Much of the "high-tech, low-life" that characterises the sprawl would become near-impossible in the high-surveillance climate of a country like modern China. I feel like you'd have to expend so much literary energy constantly explaining how they shake the basic, ubiquitous surveillance we're used to,'excusing' the characters from overexposure. Then again, explaining the mechanics of anti-surveillance might provide the kind of cyberpunk brain food that we all love.

That being said, there's plenty of ubiquitous surveillance happening in the Sprawl Trilogy. Marly's pursuit by Virek in Count Zero springs to mind here.

"there's plenty of ubiquitous surveillance happening in the Sprawl Trilogy. Marly's pursuit by Virek in Count Zero springs to mind here."

But that's an exception, only made possible by Virek's virtually limitless wealth.

When Marly becomes aware of this surveillance it's a shock to her, because she and most people in that world are not used to that level of surveillance.

Contrast that with today's world, where most people know they're being tracked and surveilled, but are ok with it, or even willingly participate in surveillance of themselves.

No one today would be surprised to be told they were recorded in public (due to ubiquitous cameras in public places) or that someone knew where they were (due to the tracking built in to their cell phones).

Gibson did not foresee this.

You've made some great points! You're totally right that Gibson did not foresee this. I think there's a difference between Virek's near omnipotence, which terrifies Marly, and the modern surveillance state. The idea that someone's phone is monitoring their location and browsing habits wouldn't surprise someone today. The idea that someone had a network of people analysing their actions in real time definitely would though.

When I originally read the Sprawl trilogy in the early 2000s, these instances of omnipresent surveillance really made an impression on me. Particularly those of Wintermute monitoring and protecting Case. The scene where Wintermute intercedes in Case's arrest ( which someone above mentioned ) stands out in particular.

There's a playthrough on Youtube ( with commentary ) of 1993's Cyberpunk classic game System Shock by the original developers. They laugh together about their lofty predictions of video mail becoming the normal mode of communication. Instead we're still sending 120 char text messages in 2020. The future is hard to predict for many reasons.

> I feel like you'd have to expend so much literary energy constantly explaining how they shake the basic, ubiquitous surveillance we're used to,'excusing' the characters from overexposure.

Cory Doctorow does a fairly creditable job explaining that in his Little Brother / Homeland/ Radicalized series.

> I think most Gibson cyberpunk failed to capture the banality of the future, because they were fixated on the romantic cowboy-gangster hackers outlaws who lived on the fringes.

This is both an excellent encapsulation of where cyberpunk missed the mark, and why its appeal is so enduring today.

The real-life cyberpunks of the 2020s aren't staging dramatic data heists or getting in firefights with megacorp-employed super-soldiers; they're selling fake social media accounts for pennies or hanging phones in trees to game Amazon's gig delivery system. Gibson was right on the money that "the street finds its own uses" for technology; his mistake was underestimating just how pedestrian both the tech and those uses would be.

In its original milieu, cyberpunk was an escape from the technological unknown. Today, its' an escape from the technological all-too-well-known.

"his mistake was underestimating just how pedestrian both the tech and those uses would be."

Nah. Gibson pretty much nailed the petty, pedestrian uses. It's just that most people only remember the glamorous parts of his books.

Here's how Gibson described a seedy ghetto bar frequented by one of the protagonists, Bobby Newmark, the eponymous Count Zero:

"People paid to get into the place because Leon pirated kino and simstim off cable and ran a lot of stuff that Barrytowners couldn't otherwise afford to access. There was dealing in the back and you could make "donations" for drinks, mostly clean Ohio hooch cut with some synthetic orange drink Leon scored in industrial quantities..."

The failed heist that much of the book revolves around was Count Zero's own attempt to steal some of that "soft kino porn".

Can't get much more pedestrian than that.

In another part of the book, a "sorcerer" explains to Bobby why he uses a critical technology in the book, in terms Bobby can understand:

Vodou, he says, "isn't concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it's about is getting things done. You follow me? In our system, there are many gods. spirits Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There's a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Vodou says, there's God, sure, Gran Met, but He's big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can't get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it's street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou's like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don't go camp on the Yakuza's doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?"

It was easy to learn from the failures and successes predicted in dystopian scifi. Take the Brave New World dystopian marketing and mix it with a touch of societal enforced wrong speak and lack of education from 1984, with the genetic manipulation and corporate domination and rampant manipulation from cyberpunk noir, voila! You have the perfect cocktail of a zombified workforce in a neo gentrification with an underclass that thinks they're educated, when they are really craftsmen to maintain software, power grids, electronics, consumerism and surveilance. (sorry... I didn't mean to get so dark)

IMO cyberpunk was maybe just too early. I think brain implants, gene editing, AI and other technologies are going to happen, and these technologies will redefine what it means to be human. We will be at risk of losing our humanity, of losing meaning, just as cyberpunk predicted. It's just... It's already been 40 years since cyberpunk started, and it might be another 40 years until those technological and human challenges really materialize. In the meantime, other important societal challenges are surfacing due to increased computerization and networking.

> IMO cyberpunk was maybe just too early. I think brain implants, gene editing, AI and other technologies are going to happen

I had a discussion with someone - "if the 21th century is the century of biotech" (the cliché in the Silicon Valley since the late 90s) is true, why are we seeing little progress? My reply was: perhaps biotech history will be similar to electronics history, and it's just too early for now. Spark-gap transmitters were put into service in the 1900 and started the electronic age. In the 1910-1920, vacuum tubes were invented (the entire radio industry started before we even had an RF amplifier). In the 1940s, the first generation of electronic computers came into existence. Transistors were invented in the 1950s and practical ones didn't exist until the 1960s. VLSI started in the early 70s, and it's only in the 1980 that the microcomputer revolution was finally here.

Although Moore's Law arguably is much older than VLSI, but it still took 40 years before the new science of electronics invented the computers, and another 40 years before VLSI's exponential growth. Thus, I wonder, is the Human Genome Project the spark-gap transmitters of our era? Then CRISPR-Cas9 is the vacuum tube? And today we see a Hacker News headline "AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology" [0], a breakthrough of protein folding using deep learning. Well, we are probably reaching the biotech equivalent of electromechanical computers right now. This "electronics-biotech" analogy seems right, if it's the case, brain-computer interface will be invented in the 2070s, like 1970s VLSI.

On the other hand, classic cyberpunk is always about the near-future. Its plots were usually based on a quick interpolation of the extreme growth of computing power we were seeing in the 80s, combined with the caricature of post-capitalism, it is only from this assumption that leads to radical social changes. If the story took place in the 22th century instead of 40 years later, it would be very "uncyberpunk". Cyberpunk's predictions has failed to materialize from this perspective. But it may still have a chance - if the singularitarianism are correct, the singularity will be there by 2050...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488

Personally, when I think of biotech, I think of gene editing, growing organs in a vat, etc. I would tend to put brain-computer interfaces in a different category.

That being said, I think that biotech is not progressing much because there's a lot of regulations slowing down research, and nobody has really demonstrated a "killer app" yet. I think what could happen, is that we will eventually be able to use gene therapy to really effectively kill cancers, and then funding is just going to pour into the field at 50 times the current rate.

There's a lot of other cool things we could do with gene editing, like fixing incurable depression, life extension, fixing genetic diseases, curing irritable bowel syndrome and dangerous allergies, but there's currently not enough funding, and there's not enough excitement, people are too worried about "ethical" implications.

I think it might be similar with brain-computer interfaces. Someone needs to spend a lot of money to get the first version working. It's possible that Elon Musk will win that race with Neuralink. If we can have a brain implant that allows a paraplegic person to move a robot arm, send texts and make themselves dinner... 10 years later you will have disabled people walking with exoskeletons and hackers hooking themselves up to computers. It could all happen within our lifetime. We just need someone to make that first killer demo, then funding pours in, 100 startups pop up overnight, and innovation really takes off.

I think the idea that regulation is slowing down research is a bit too simplistic to the point of being misleading. It's important to consider how regulation comes about, how that process shapes the regulation, how research gets funded, and so on.

Our modern economic landscape of conglomeration over competition is important. It came about in part because of regulation, but repealing regulation would not undo it and return us to a Renaissance of competitive independent businesses. This strained, rigid, highly interconnected economy has made it so that only the big institutions can afford to take substantial risks, and already being the giant wealth funnels that they are, there's little incentive to take those risks.

The greater the share of the economy made up by giant interconnected businesses with an aligned profit motive, the less risk taking, disruption, and innovation there will be. You shouldn't need to be Elon to be entrepreneurial at the cutting edge, but you do, because you can't compete with Elon. You shouldn't need to have Amazon's resources, but you do. Looser regulations are moot.