I tend to think of cyberpunk as more Blade Runner which is kind of spread out with room for flying cars.
Its power has never been in its predictive ability, because so much of what defines cyberpunk is already happening. Instead, the consideration of, "That horrible thing can happen to me, too," opens the intellectual doorway (or third eye) to questions of self, cognizance, experience. The computers are just a light show, or a lens.
In the essay, Kowloon is not the dystopia - that is Singapore - it is the utopia:
https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2021/06/27/c...
Gibson writes about Singapore's artificial "squeaky-clean authoritarian", style with almost physical revulsion, while Kowloon comes off as the plucky antihero that is overtly kind of a dick but that we all are secretly rooting for.
I also don't think that Singapore would really qualify as an utopia. The death penalty is real and the democracy there seems to exist mostly on paper. But at least the state actively tries to solve problems in society and improve the standard of living for everyone.
In contrast, Kowloon was a place literally built and run by the mafia, and by all records must have been hell to actually live in (as opposed to read stories about it).
I feel a lot of cyberpunk comes over like this: Pretending to be a cautionary tale on the surface but at the same time, presenting it with such a kind of longing, wistful outlook that it's pretty clear the authors would love to be in that place in some way.
Makes me kind of understand how we got to the "at last, we built the Torment Nexus" territory in the end.
