One thing I've noticed in many more recent sci-fi and other-genre works detailing near futures of our world is the tendency for some of humanity's most animalistic and basic (as in low) behaviors to become much more widely accepted and popularized. In the Neuromancer, we have the entirety of Night City essentially run on illegal trade of drugs, data, sex, and other blackmarket operations and goods. Sure, most of it is justified by Case as "a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself," for new medical procedures, cybernetics, and other such inventions to be field tested without regard to regulatory action, but much of the business is extraneous to this. I'm almost completely certain you don't need to field test narcotics and hallucinogens for legal trade at least. The only form of sport even presented in the novel is a knife-fight to the death, which is well received by attendees. It all just seems a bit chaotic and insane, especially in contrast to more classic idealizations of future earth civilizations where everyone gets along fine, wears the same silvery jumpsuits, and only worries about violence coming from an invading alien race that wishes to steal our well-preserved natural resources. I feel that these depictions are very much a result of changes in political climates. Starship Troopers, for example, has a pretty clear divide between the entirety of the human race and its bug enemy, and was written not long after WWII and Korea, times when we had a pretty good sense that we were in fact the good guys and they were the bad guys (maybe not as strongly in Korea, but still pretty good). The Neuromancer, on the other hand, came out near the end of the Cold War and after Vietnam, which were very ambiguous wars, and things like Watergate, which caused much national tension, leaving many skeptical of governments and human goodness, and reflects all this in its very grungy, corrupt representation of urban life and human relations. So I wonder, which future will come out to be more accurate, which future are we more headed towards? I'm not gonna lie, the Neuromancer model seems much more exciting and interesting to me. And there's no way in hell I'm wearing a silver jumpsuit regularly.