It would seem, in a post-COVID 2022, writing from cash-is-gone Shenzhen, the welcome mat of the PRD-sprawl with news today of Canada's anti-protest crackdowns,

It would seem, in a post-COVID 2022, writing from cash-is-gone Shenzhen, the welcome mat of the PRD-sprawl with news today of Canada's anti-protest crackdowns, Korean epidemia, and Chinese naval lasers off the Australian coast, that Gibson understated the human appetite for autocracy and big governance and overstated the facility of megacorps to succeed from nation states as the dominant social architects. Having worked in Samsung HQ, corporate dystopias melded with neo-Confucian or other East Asian culture-derived hierarchies are very much real. Only the AIs and some smart materials are yet to come. Synth-food is on the mark and flying robotics is technically here but not yet accepted by regulators. As someone I met from a major Chinese tech company yesterday said, as he confided corporate think-tank strategic future visions of a phone-free 5G future where smart surfaces like taxi windows beamed real time computing from the privacy-unobtainable corporate cloud and autonomous facial identification precluded antiquated rituals of QR-code based mobile payment, nobody cares about privacy and convenience is king. Gibsonian dystopia is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.