Gad.
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I recently re-read the Sprawl Trilogy and have been reflecting on how silly the hacking aspect of it really is. The Matrix seems to exist solely as a target for theft, and despite the fact that cyberdecks are corporate products, the idea of someone owning a cyberdeck pretty much automatically means they’re a criminal. And nobody seems to have been working on a way to protect their nervous systems from black ice.
(I’m working on an album inspired by some of the bits of language in Neuromancer. Ambient but with kind of synthwave-inspired fake retroness to it, along with some actual retro FM synth hardware being abused.)
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You’ll have to add some of the sound of a TV set, tuned to a dead channel.
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Yeah, but it was cool in its own alternate-reality way - what hacking could be like. Back in the 90s I spent some time trying to re-cast/convert the cyberpunk-style hacking from fiction and the RPGs into real-world terms. Played the PC games from the old ASCII text mode BBS door Netrunner to Decker and more modern games like Uplink, Hacknet, and TIS-100, and some half-baked attempts that people made at converting Shadowrun decking to a 3-D RPG aid (so GMs could play with the rest of the team while the player with the decker character played with the PC). None of that works as well as the narrative in the books, and mostly the more realistic you try to make it, the worse it is.
But also, at the time the Sprawl trilogy was written (and even for awhile afterward), those ideas actually kinda fit rather well. The 'net didn’t exist solely for stealing information, but security was pretty much nonexistent. A 13-14 year old could literally accidentally stumble into root access on a government system on your first try:
>ATDT 1-888-555-1234
Connect 1200.
Welcome to the XYZ agency system. If you have any problems, contact your sysop, @JohnDoe.
login> JohnDoe
password> admin
Welcome back JohnDoe. You have 14 new messages.
And normal people didn’t have computers and knew nothing of the 'net. If you had one, and a modem, and knew the lingo, they would assume that you were doing shady stuff. The old people in charge of the laws were (and still are) even more clueless. As late as the 2010’s (maybe still) people have been arrested for accessing publicly available documents and sued just for linking to another website. To some people, anyone who uses it even the way it’s intended to be used must be a criminal.
Black Ice and AI were like the big new scary things that only insiders would even know about and they hadn’t figured out how to deal with them yet. They made good scary unknowns.
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Yeah, at the time it seemed maybe not that far off of plausible in some aspects, and definitely it captured the imagination. And it was absolutely full of style, which I think is why it endures 
Yep, I’m on it
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I bet the AI was complaining about it’s “contractor” stays and had reached out to a labor organization.
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Oh that fills me with confidence.
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We need another disaster for after COVID-19 is over
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“Screw him. I’ll just get out my trusty Dremel tool and . . . oops.”
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I wonder where the part of the tuition that pays for salary is going.
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