We are living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal.

Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sense/Net.

Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.

Old dystopias were too neat. Even the evil systems had a plan. Reality is messier and more absurd. Maybe aliens are the only thing left that's still safely fictional.

[delayed]

I agree, it is easy to miss just because we get used to things quickly. I remember this thought hitting me vividly when I saw this picture during COVID https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...

Something recently occured to me. The plot of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain (the less-successful followup to the more famous 1965 The Ipcress File and 1966 Funeral in Berlin, all starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer), while I though the movie plot kind of stupid when I first saw it years ago, the plot is today actually completely plausible, and it is odd that no modern James Bond or Impossible Mission-style movie has done it.

It's telling that The Ghost in the Shell, the 2026 adaptation, is still set in 2029-2030.

There is a fine line between science fiction informing reality, and straight up delusion. We are living in delusional times—like a fever dream. Sooner or later, the patient either heals or dies.

the future is here, it's just not evenly distrubuted conversly, there is no human technology that isn't still bieng practiced in it's original form, ie: there are still people knapping stone tools that learned it from there parents and grandparents going on strait back to the first members of our "species" who learned it from there hybrid parents, in an unbroken chain, which is directly connected to ALL modern technology, in that early metal working was done with stone tools, as metal was far to precious for mundane or general use, and still at this moment ALL technolgy is powered by fire, wheels and levers at it's base and is instantly understandable and intuitive in it's use, but as others are pointing out, that matters little in relation to the setting and the style of our gadjets and tools, which as some others point out, may be impossible to understand from a certain asthetic back ground or as I am always happy to find out that something is in fact a WHOLE THING which a bunch of people are realy realy into, or even better when someone has a THING thats just for them. all fine by me.

I disagree. Gibson's dystopias are too competent, too well organized, too serious. I feel like we're headed somewhere between the satire of Neal Stephenson and the lunatic delirium of Philip K. Dick.

The only reason I know who J.G. Ballard is is because of Jean Baudrillard.

I'm convinced it was the similarity of their names which convinced Jean to read J.G's work.

It's more like a deliberate, manufactured future by the bigdiks that slowly takes place in certain countries.

Dystopian fiction was supposed to be a manual but a warning that was ignored.

Another thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.

Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling mass is what he calls "biz." It's "just biz."

I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power.

On a personal level it means you have to find these things in your personal life and the family and community you build around you, and you should not look for or expect these things from larger scale social structures. They can't deliver them, and the reasons might not just be "corruption" or "people are assholes." They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate.

Gibson depicts this too. His world of the Sprawl was bleak but there were pockets of people who had created what amounted to intentional communities within it. I'm thinking of the Afro-American-futurist arcologies in Count Zero or the orbital subcultures like the Rastafarians. Some of the subculture around the "console cowboys" also counts.

EDIT:

Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data, Enterprise's AI, droids in Star Wars) or malevolent (Colossus, Skynet, Dune's prehistory).