There may be cyberspace in cyberpunk, but there’s no social media. There may be surveillance, but there’s resistance to it. Who could have guessed in the 1980s that we would choose to surveil ourselves, that we would happily give up every crumb of personal information for packages delivered a few days sooner and tailored search results? Cyberpunk offers a nostalgic escape from what is dystopic in our present, not by appealing to some idealized past, but by imagining an alternate timeline in which those things never came to pass.