Cyberpunk has always been, "What if what happens to those people happened to us?" "Us" being the relatively affluent and stable first world, "those people" bein

Cyberpunk has always been, "What if what happens to those people happened to us?" "Us" being the relatively affluent and stable first world, "those people" being the put-upon urban poor and working class (which I usually summarize as "black Americans" for American readers - to shake them out of their myopia regarding the social and racial politics of the genre - but, as you point out, should include people in Asia and elsewhere). Its power has never been in its predictive ability, because so much of what defines cyberpunk is already happening. Instead, the consideration of, "That horrible thing can happen to me, too," opens the intellectual doorway (or third eye) to questions of self, cognizance, experience. The computers are just a light show, or a lens.