ALL the big stars are on their way out. The only famous people left are celebrity “entertainers” who are much easier to control, like that dancing neo-Keynesian Ed Balls.

Sounds like dystopian fiction? Well, it is, sort of. Rereading William Gibson’s sic-fi novel Idoru, not only do you snark at the things he got wrong — how did cyberpunk fail to predict the banality of smartphones? — but you marvel too at repeated displays of prescience.

So the power and danger of human data, spiralling out in a million clicks, hits, and purchases, are worth thinking about when we seem happier revealing everything we are to the supermarkets than to doctors or the local council.

There are fun Gibson parodies online in which his breathless, taut prose style describes today’s dreary internet, dominated by those cuddly giants Facebook and Google.

But given their algorithmic manipulation of news and fake news in the lead-up to the election of Donald Trump, perhaps we’re living in a future shittier than predicted.

The author’s meditations on fame bring to mind two figures who died this year. His story centres around a band, Lo-Rez, who are mind-bogglingly famous and stupefyingly rich.

This infuriates the likes of Slitscan, powerful celebrity entities who come across like a ubiquitous multinational combination of YouTube and the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame. They control, create, regulate, tax, and destroy fame, to the consternation of the millions desperate for their 15 minutes, no matter the inevitably ruinous consequences.

But Slitscan can’t get close to singer Rez, a half-Chinese, half-Irish megastar who seems based somewhat on Prince.

Ubiquitous but unknowable, he may or may not be on the verge of marrying a software agent. It’s the sort of thing you could imagine Prince doing. His alien strangeness will only seem more remarkable in time and so will that of David Bowie, who makes an appearance of sorts in Idoru as the inspiration for an interactive guide to Venice.

We’re a few years away from it yet but it makes you wonder what’ll happen after all the Baby Boomer and Generation X greats pass away — people like Leonard Cohen whose infinite fame comes from a back catalogue that was created when pop was a legitimate career for someone who wanted to define the present and help shape the future.

Bob Dylan, not deigning to pause from his endless tour to pick up his Nobel Prize, is someone you can make a legitimate argument about as someone who did both those things.

But now he’s a relic, a living memory. Such is the shift in our culture that in 50 years’ time, assuming civilisation still abides, the death of Mark Zuckerberg will be of greater note than the death of Adele.

While on the subject of cyberpunk, the controversial Hollywood update of classic anime Ghost in the Shell finally released its trailer last week. The remake is controversial largely for its casting. The far-future Japan of the anime is now overwhelmingly populated with white American characters, save for a brief glimpse of Beat Takeshi as Chief Aramaki.

The protagonist, augmented-cybernetic Major Motoko Kusanagi, is now played by Scarlett Johansson, who has form in the otherworldly female-loner category after her performances in Lucy and Under the Skin.

Away from whitewashing, the film also has another major problem, the plot. The trailer reveals the main narrative to be the Major’s origins and identity rather than — as in the anime — what she, and all of us, are to become.

Basically, it’s a sanitised Robocop, without that film’s brutal satirical power.