As Harry Potter is to Lord of the Rings This would be to Neuromancer
Little Brother is close. As is Ready Player One.
This dovetails into my Third Place idea.
What resource is scarce enough to get young cyberpunks out of their parents’ basements? In this day and age it certainly isn’t The Internet.
What resource is scarce in your parents’ basement? Freedom.
“I already bought you a state-of-the-art (and very expensive) iPhone, why do you now want a crappy (yet also expensive) Android phone?”
Perhaps the mall has a hacker space / Internet café / video-game shop that is a front for running unsanctioned applications.
I started having a conversation with my too-young child. (At least, too young to be a cyberpunk at the mall without parents interfering.) While I was asking this child what would get characters to the mall, they suggested, “a new video game that they really wanted to play?”
Teddy’s parents procured him an old, run-down computer when what he really wanted was a shiny new video-game console. He goes on a massive adventure trying to procure a shiny console that will play the latest game, only to realize that you need a bunch of money for upgrades etc.
He learns all kinds of things about software cracking etc. Eventually he unlocks the paid upgrades, and then he realizes that he could have been modding games on his computer the whole time.
Something like that…