If we're talking anime, I'd also nominate Dennou Coil - near-future, quite plausible examination of pervasive AR tech. Instead of the usual "prop for generic au

If we're talking anime, I'd also nominate Dennou Coil - near-future, quite plausible examination of pervasive AR tech. Instead of the usual "prop for generic authoritarian hellscape" dynamic, you get a fairly balanced look at the effects of the tech on a recognizably similar society. I think I found the concept/world particularly compelling because the bulk of the story ends up being about where and how that tech breaks: for instance, you've got an underground economy where the primary currency is essentially zero-days and plot points that (implicitly) center on concepts like cache coherency and eventually-consistent distributed systems. Most of the other examples of sci-fi futures I wouldn't hate living in are far-future, the Culture being the obvious one. The grandparent seems to be on to something: there aren't a lot of hopeful (or at least ambivalently complex) recent works that focus on near futures instead of post-scarcity spacemen.