Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans...
I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series. A world where technological and sociological development of humanity went mostly parallel. We now seem to develop technology faster than ourselves. Current SciFi is therefor mostly on the dark and dramatic side.
The original Star Trek also had a megacorp keeping workers pacified with neurotoxins (The Cloud Minders) sex slavery with advanced pharmaceuticals (Mudd's Women,) genetically engineered elites oppressing baseline humans (Space Seed) and AI run amok (The Changeling, I, Mudd and others.)
It was optimistic, but it was also a product of the 60's. Fear of the future was there, it just tended to be presented in political terms, through metaphors of the Cold War and Vietnam, rather than technological.
The Cloud Minders was the opposite. The neurotoxin was an accident that no one believed existed until the Enterprise arrived, and it made the lower caste violent, not pacified.
Instead, it has somewhat realistic space physics, a trade-off I will gladly take.
If I want mind-bending stuff there's still Legion and Mr Robot out there, not exactly "cyberpunk VR darknets" but very strong on alternate reality/conscious themes.
> I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series.
If you haven't yet, check out The Orville. It's the spiritual successor to Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek.
It got badly marketed as a comedy in space akin to Galaxy Quest, but that was mostly bad marketing. The first episode or two were high on the comedy (and I've heard a theory that they did it to trick Fox into picking up the series), but it rapidly toned down, to where it's more like Star Trek with realistic people instead of a utopian version of humanity without any vices.
For a one-episode introduction, if the initial comedy turns you off, I suggest episode 3, About a Girl.
I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series. A world where technological and sociological development of humanity went mostly parallel. We now seem to develop technology faster than ourselves. Current SciFi is therefor mostly on the dark and dramatic side.