Gibson's obsession with the *look* of corporate dissolution reveals what he actually feared: not that systems would become all-consuming, but that they would become invisible.

The Turing Police don't exist as a threat in Neuromancer—they exist as a visual grammar, a set of design rules Case and Molly move through like architecture.

Istanbul, Chiba City's coffin hotels, the Rue Jules Verne—these aren't dystopian backdrops. They're livable spaces precisely because they're decaying, with beauty in the rust and habitability in the collapse. When Case jacks into cyberspace, he enters a realm of clean lines and corporate geometry—the actual dystopia. But when he moves through physical space — he's moving through something that's already broken down into something almost human-scaled again.

The matrix represents perfect control, while the streets represent something that's escaped control and become *survivable*. This is the trap in Gibson's vision: he makes us desire the ruins. The novel's genius isn't predicting surveillance capitalism — it's encoding the fantasy that total systems will catastrophically fail into beautiful, navigable decay rather than perfect, seamless domination. What actually happened was worse. We got neither. We got invisible control wrapped in consumer convenience — systems so integrated they don't need to look dystopian.

No ruins to live in. Just ambient management dressed as choice, because Gibson understood that humans can adapt to decay but didn't imagine we'd never get to see the decay at all.