Cyberpunk

a couple years ago I listened to the audiobook. and the foreword talks a bit about how the current generation probably doesn't really know what the color of a dead channel actually looks like

It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful—a whopping anachronism, right at the very start of my career in the imaginary future.

But an invisible one, interestingly; one that reveals a peculiar grace enjoyed by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future, where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers. Readers compensated for me, shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden, and allowed whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on the melancholy of the phrase “dead channel”.

and you go "hm, yeah, I imagine that people really don't know what it would look like."

But then at the end, gibson signs with the date, and the foreword was written for the 20th aniversary in 2004.

More time has now passed between that foreword and now, than the foreword and the release.

And the problem of people not knowing what a dead channel looks like, would be even bigger