[cityofghosts]

The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 by Bruce sterling was the first long form e book I read. It foretold the future in many ways. 1st, it was a bright shining line between the old world of govt doing this stuff in shadows, buried in a blurb on of 10 of the newspaper, and it being in the open for millions to read all the details, about plain as day. As long as you knew bbses... it was there. Second, it was distributed for free so I payed the author nothing, which felt weird. Like a piece was misssing. Third it introduced me to brutal fatalism, which is a cousin of realism but also a neighbor of depression. There was no happy ending, people did not learn from their mistakes, bad deeds were not apologized for not punished, and laws did not change. Law enforcement are still, largely, uneducated and technically illiterate, and they are still going after harmless nobodies for no good reason.