If you're talking about Kowloon Walled City, I found Gibson's essay "Disneyland with the death penalty" (and the fact that the essay blew up like it did) pretty

If you're talking about Kowloon Walled City, I found Gibson's essay "Disneyland with the death penalty" (and the fact that the essay blew up like it did) pretty revealing about how the actual preferences in (western) SciFi are. In the essay, Kowloon is not the dystopia - that is Singapore - it is the utopia: https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2021/06/27/cyberpunk-is-dead-william-gibson-the-walled-city-of-kowloon-and-the-future-of-asia/ https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2021/06/27/c... Gibson writes about Singapore's artificial "squeaky-clean authoritarian", style with almost physical revulsion, while Kowloon comes off as the plucky antihero that is overtly kind of a dick but that we all are secretly rooting for. I also don't think that Singapore would really qualify as an utopia. The death penalty is real and the democracy there seems to exist mostly on paper. But at least the state actively tries to solve problems in society and improve the standard of living for everyone. In contrast, Kowloon was a place literally built and run by the mafia, and by all records must have been hell to actually live in (as opposed to read stories about it). I feel a lot of cyberpunk comes over like this: Pretending to be a cautionary tale on the surface but at the same time, presenting it with such a kind of longing, wistful outlook that it's pretty clear the authors would love to be in that place in some way. Makes me kind of understand how we got to the "at last, we built the Torment Nexus" territory in the end.