#techcriticism

We’re at the threshold of a divide in digital life: one future dominated by corporate-controlled, subscription-heavy platforms that centralize feeds, payments, and identity; the other driven by open systems, modular tools, and developer autonomy. This isn’t fiction — the tech world is already writing both scripts in parallel.

On the corporate side, legacy platforms continue to push premium services that bundle AI capabilities and value-added features behind recurring payments. The strategy resembles the “everything app” model that has increasingly animated major social platforms: integrated messaging, media distribution, financial services, and enhanced AI interactions all living behind a single branded interface. X — the service that emerged from what was once Twitter — has publicly outlined ambitions for X Money, an in-app payments and wallet function built with partners like Visa as part of its roadmap toward broader financial tooling later in 2025, even as exact launch dates remain fluid. Executive leadership shifts on the project have also occurred this year.

Much of this vision borrows inspiration from super-app ecosystems elsewhere, where a single service stitches together messaging, media, and commerce. However, rolling out such convergence in Western markets has proven operationally and regulatory complex, with traditional financial licensing, privacy requirements, and user adoption all factors that could slow or reshape these plans.

By contrast, systems-level development and tooling are seeing momentum on a different axis. The Rust programming language — prized for memory safety and modern design — has recently shed its experimental status in the Linux kernel, becoming a recognised core component alongside C and assembly. This marks a substantial shift in low-level open-source infrastructure, with official kernel maintainers affirming Rust’s place in future releases and developer workflows.

Microsoft’s engagement with Rust fits into this broader industry trend: while Windows itself still rests on a foundation of C/C++, the company is actively investing in Rust tooling for secure driver development and system components, and building internal frameworks to support Rust alongside traditional languages.

These dual currents — centralized corporate platforms and decentralized systems innovation — are shaping a digital bifurcation. On one track, users may increasingly dwell inside polished, subscription-anchored ecosystems that lock in services and experiences. On the other, developers and power users push toward open stacks, memory-safe languages, and composable AI-assisted tooling that enable bespoke environments and control.

This coming split isn’t inherently dystopian; it’s an evolutionary inflection. One path optimizes convenience and unified identity under corporate governance. The other prioritizes openness, interoperability, and user agency in building and shaping their own digital domains.

What Cyberpunk’s Authors Were Actually Trying to Do — and Why Some Futures Aged Better Than Others

Cyberpunk has always had a branding problem. To outsiders it looks like neon, mirrorshades, and leather jackets arguing with capitalism. To insiders, it’s something much colder: a literature of angles, not predictions. The best cyberpunk writers were never trying to guess gadgets. They were stress-testing power, culture, and human behaviour under technological pressure.

Which is why, thirty to forty years on, some works feel eerily documentary — while others feel like a warm duvet wrapped around a collapsing building.

This is a story about that split.

The Early Warning System: Gibson and Structural Reality

When Neuromancer landed, William Gibson wasn’t forecasting the future so much as mapping inequality as an environment. His worlds weren’t “what if” scenarios — they were pressure chambers. Corporations weren’t villains, they were weather systems. You didn’t fight them; you dressed for them and hoped not to drown.

Gibson’s later Blue Ant trilogy quietly completed that arc. No cyberspace cowboys. No chrome prosthetics. Just brand consultants, billionaires with custom aircraft, private intelligence networks, and governments that could be stepped into and out of like badly managed meeting rooms.

Readers who worked in tech, media, or consultancy between roughly 2010–2016 didn’t read Blue Ant as science fiction. They read it as Tuesday. The power dynamics were already in place: capital drifting freely, culture as soft logistics, and influence replacing ideology.¹

This wasn’t cyberpunk abandoning the future. It was cyberpunk admitting the future had already arrived — boring, expensive, and quietly owned.

Snow Crash: Culture as a Weapon System

If Gibson mapped terrain, Neal Stephenson weaponised language.

Snow Crash is often misremembered as a book about VR avatars and sword-wielding hackers. That’s cosplay. The real payload was memetics: the idea that culture itself can function as executable code.

Stephenson wasn’t predicting smartphones or virtual worlds. He was modelling information as an attack surface — language as malware, belief as a delivery vector, identity as something that could be hijacked remotely. In hindsight, Snow Crash reads less like satire and more like a pre-mortem for algorithmic radicalisation, disinformation campaigns, and culture-war psyops.²

Later works like REAMDE and Fall; or, Dodge in Hell doubled down on systems thinking: cryptographic trust, object persistence, tokenised agency. Long before NFTs became a punchline, Stephenson was already asking what happens when objects gain verifiable identity across worlds.

It wasn’t hype. It was architecture.

Ready Player One: The Comfort Culture Problem

Then there’s Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — a book that knows exactly what it’s doing and can’t stop itself anyway.

On the surface, Ready Player One gestures toward critique: corporate control is bad, living in the past is unhealthy, escapism is dangerous. But structurally, the book rewards characters exclusively for deep immersion in nostalgia. Cultural recall becomes moral worth. The future is inherited by whoever memorised the past hardest.

This is where the fault line opens.

Ready Player One doesn’t build a future culture — it curates a museum gift shop and calls it a civilisation. Nostalgia isn’t treated as a transitional comfort (a blanket); it’s repurposed as infrastructure (a house). The book warns the reader not to live there — then hands them the keys.

When the Hollywood adaptation arrived, it wasn’t a betrayal. It was destiny. The text was already ideologically primed for stewardship rather than resistance. Corporate capture wasn’t challenged; it was aestheticised. The system remained inevitable — just slightly nicer if the right nerd was in charge.

Cyberpunk without consequences isn’t rebellion. It’s reassurance.

Why Some Futures Age and Others Fossilise

The dividing line isn’t optimism versus pessimism. It’s angle.

Gibson wrote about power as ambient reality

Stephenson wrote about culture as weaponised code

Cline wrote about nostalgia as identity validation

The first two interrogate systems that operate regardless of individual virtue. The third centres emotional comfort — and comfort cultures do not survive contact with power. They get absorbed, branded, and resold.

Which is why readers now find themselves nostalgically longing for the Blue Ant era tech world — a time that already felt compromised, but still had friction, ambiguity, and room to move sideways. That nostalgia isn’t for gadgets. It’s for operating space.

Conclusion: Cyberpunk Was Never About the Future

Cyberpunk’s mistake was letting people think it was predictive.

It was diagnostic.

The best cyberpunk didn’t ask what will happen. It asked who benefits, who pays, and who disappears quietly.

Some authors followed that question wherever it led — into uncomfortable realism. Others flinched and wrapped the answer in pop culture references like insulation.

And here we are, decades later, living in a world Gibson documented, Stephenson modelled, and Ready Player One tried very hard not to think about.

Nostalgia is still useful. Just don’t try to build a civilisation out of it.

References

Gibson, W. Pattern Recognition (2003); Spook Country (2007); Zero History (2010).

Stephenson, N. Snow Crash (1992); see also contemporary analysis of memetic warfare and information operations in digital culture.

by Richard Brautigan (first published in 1967)

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.