New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
TL;DR
Ray Newman argues that we already live in J.G. Ballard's or William Gibson's future. His evidence is a year of news clippings about robot dogs, AI soul singers, narco subs and face-recognition glasses. The strange part is how little anyone notices, since people absorb each oddity within days.
The article
- Newman borrows Michael Moorcock's habit of opening chapters with newspaper clippings that show the apocalypse already underway. He builds the essay from about twenty real news excerpts from 2025 and 2026.
- The clippings include an IV drip clinic in a Westfield mall and an AI soul singer with 2.6 million monthly Spotify listeners. Others cover a robot that chased boars out of Warsaw and Meta's hidden "NameTag" face recognition for its smart glasses.
- The visionaries got the details wrong. Nobody bet on cigarettes or scooters going digital, or on LEDs replacing neon. The backdrop is wildfires in the English Midlands instead of Blade Runner's acid rain.
- The real shock is the lack of shock. His mum asks a voice assistant to remind her about the sprouts, and colleagues send AI bots to meetings. A former colleague's first robotaxi ride got a few weak thumbs-up on LinkedIn.
- Science fiction writers are stuck. Anything they invent may come true three weeks later, and nobody will blink. Newman guesses he would adapt to a world 50 or 100 years ahead in about 48 hours.
Why it matters
Read it in full for the clippings themselves, which read like a Ballard collage when stacked together. The summary keeps the argument but loses that cumulative effect.
The discussion
A lively, mostly agreeing thread asked a different question: if this is cyberpunk, why does it feel so drab and so stupid? Commenters argued over whether the future lacks Gibson's style, whether Shenzhen already has it, and whether Gibson was the right author to name. Long side threads covered China, Idiocracy and Ballard reading lists.
The dystopia arrived without the style
The top thread holds that we got cyberpunk's corporate dystopia with none of its cool, because Amazon and Google look nothing like Arasaka or Hosaka. Others replied that Apple and Disney have aesthetics people build identities around, and that today's look is "Corporate Memphis". Attempts at sci-fi style, they added, give you the Cybertruck and RGB lights. Several Gibson readers said the cool always lived in his subcultures and back alleys, and his commercial mainstream was meant to be soulless.
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.
The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.
Wrong author: it's Stephenson, Dick, Brunner or Idiocracy
Many thought Gibson's dystopias too competent for the present, and preferred Stephenson's satire, Philip K. Dick's delirium or Idiocracy. The UFC fight on the White House lawn came up as the clincher for Idiocracy's mix of advanced tech and dumb people. One commenter pushed back hard on Idiocracy, noting its president actually seeks out the smartest man to help his people. Others nominated John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider as the most predictive books of all.
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.
In Idiocracy, the nation is led by a person who cares about the well-being of all his constituents and seeks out the most capable person in order to improve the material state of his people.
Shenzhen as cyberpunk made real
Animats answered the "no aesthetics" complaint with a night walk through Shenzhen: giant screens, synchronized building light shows, drones, robots and self-driving cars. Critics said a well-run, high-tech city has the cyber but none of the punk, with no lowlifes or social collapse in view. It turned into an argument about China's rise, its demographics and whether Gibson, who set his futures in Japan, had predicted Asian dominance all along.
Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings.
I see cyber, but where's the punk? Where's the "lowlife" or the societal collapse?
What Gibson got right
One commenter credited Gibson with predicting the fusion of governments, corporations, finance, spies and organized crime into amoral "biz". He wondered whether societies have grown too big to hold together, and said only Gibson predicted AI art. Others rebutted that with Vonnegut's EPICAC, Dahl, Orwell's novel machines, Lem and Ballard himself. Fans called the later Jackpot books bleaker and closer to now, and a few admitted the Sprawl novels are a chore to read.
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.
Once the concept of “electronic brains” was there, the idea that they might also produce art like a human brain can wasn’t far.
People who want the dystopia
A smaller thread worried about readers who took cyberpunk as a blueprint. Some fans just want neon, dense cities and implants, which need no corporate tyranny. Others picture themselves as the CEO-king of a Night City, and commenters saw that same mindset in Silicon Valley boardrooms.
Most of them just want neon lights, dense and chaotic cities, space stations, advanced VR, robots and superpowered implants. None of that requires a corporate dystopia, and I think they would make our lives better.
Consensus
Most agreed the present has plenty of science-fiction material and that people get used to it fast. Most also agreed it looks drabber and more chaotic than the fiction promised.
Dissent
A sizable group rejected the Gibson framing. They called today messier and more absurd than his well-organized dystopias. Some said the true cyberpunk look already exists in Shenzhen, or that cyberpunk's cool always belonged to its subcultures.