alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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I would disagree with that, I've seen people anchor their own identity to that of brands like Apple or Disney.
They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.
I think the fact that these kinds of companies were portrayed as such in fiction kind of prevents them from adopting the cool aesthetic. Like they need something to separate them from being the exact image of an evil futuristic corporation that lives in our heads. Or else we might actually recognize what they are.
writing often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison
At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters.
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.
The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.
Most corporations are boring, but there absolutely are some cool ones, they often aren’t as public as the big consumer ones.
Arasaka types are rare, it’s mostly big blobs like DatAmerica.
They had to make it cool to make it palatable and not a slog for entertainment purposes. Without that it's just a depressing read of reality.
These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.