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.

> we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.

Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night markets where you can buy both food and electronics. Self-driving cars. Electric buses and taxis. Women in colorful outfits on motorcycles.

Shenzhen looks more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077, the game.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiXpYbCZyjs

I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?

On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.

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.

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/.

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.

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.

The dystopia will be televised in Corporate Memphis.

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.

Those aesthetics are only "cool" in the sense that stylized comic book / military sci-fi conceptions of tech are cool. Also '80s nostalgia, and satire. In reality, none of that could exist practically in the modern day. Real-world high-tech is either consumer-oriented family friendly or hopelessly enterprise beige and gray. LA NIMBYs are not going to let you build a corporate pyramid. The closest we have in reality is the Memphis Bass Pro Shop.

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.

writing often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison