The film was a transparent riff on Plato’s Cave, or so the internet said—I had never read Plato. It was also a delicious allegory for techno-libertarianism, and probably LSD. It was easy to see why the movie appealed. Canonically, what hackers accessed was the ability to surveil without consent. I knew the genuine thrill of watching a cross-section of society flow through a system, seeing the high-level, bird’s-eye view—the full map, the traffic, the stream of data pouring down the screen. The movie didn’t just make hackers look sexy. It glamorized circumvention, the outcast’s righteous
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