John Brunner's novel's main failure of prescience is its excessive optimism. His predictions --- identity-fraud, hacking, virtual communities, worms, etc. --- have
Lyotard took a somewhat unconventional form for his work of fiction: essentially, he took one of the long info-dumps which mar works of science fiction and let it metastasize until it had consumed the book. This gives it the appearance of non-fiction, and one understands that a number of reviewers were taken in. In fact it's a fairly standard presentation of fears about the Big Brotherish consequences of data-bases (found in other contemporary works of lesser vogue, like John Wicklein's Electronic Nightmare: The New Communications and Freedom), and of being deceived by the media generally. Lyotard doesn't seem to have grasped even the most elementary possibilities of computers, since he seems to think that, because computers are designed to implement Boolean logic functions (true), they can only represent things which are ``logical'' in the vernacular sense (which is bollocks). The notion that ``local knowledges'' (read: stories people tell) could not be stored, processed and manipulated by computers reads incredibly strangely today...
In general, Lyotard displays little insight into the possible ways people can use computers. The very possibility of using them as instruments of communication, for instance, escapes him, though he was writing ten years after the start of ARPAnet, though Brunner caught it, and though academics who actually had some knowledge of computer technology (e.g., Hiltz and Turoff, _The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer_, Addison-Wesley 1978) wrote huge and insightful books about it.