Cyberpunk does not require a date centuries from now. Its stories often feel close because they extend familiar arrangements: a service becomes unavoidable, a company gains another role in daily life, or a network makes an old inequality harder to escape. The distance from the present matters less than how clearly the world shows those consequences.
Nearness can increase tension
An imagined city only a few years ahead may use recognizable phones, offices, and apartments. A single change in access rules can then feel unsettling. A distant future offers more room for new bodies and environments, but it still needs believable relationships between people and institutions. Neither timeframe guarantees depth.
The label also does not turn a story into a prediction. Fiction may exaggerate one possibility to make a question visible. Readers should distinguish a writer's imagined system from a claim that a particular real technology will develop exactly that way.
One change can be enough
A near-future story does not need flying cars and a new alphabet. Imagine that a familiar apartment building now requires a single work-linked account for rent, entry, and maintenance requests. A lost job does not instantly lock every door, but it can make each ordinary task harder. Following one resident through a week of calls and appeals reveals more than a list of inventions.
The same change could have benefits: a shared system might speed up repairs for some tenants. Showing who receives that benefit and who can challenge an error prevents the premise from becoming a simple warning about technology itself.