I think it's more precise to paraphrase that he, William Gibson cannot imagine the past as it was. He is interested in fashion, surfaces, narrative, velocity, and futurism as such. But there's a reason he emerged in California with its active obliteration of history and not say, Switzerland.

The Swiss would find it absurd to imagine that their past is inaccessible when they have all the written records, the buildings, the family letters and a rich progressive regional literature that would be of little interest to the outside world.

They would've found it hard to imagine the impersonal (and predictive) dystopian cyberpunk since they have a degree of effective devolutionary democracy unimaginable to most americans. But as it turns out, California and east asia seem to be more representative of the future.