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 Every Cyberpunk that’s read and reread their copy of Neuromancer gets that heady rush and thrill of excitement from walking in the shoes of a world class hacker. Gibson’s revolutionary vision of the Cyberpunk world has not diminished in its potency over the years, but in that time we’ve often come to question whether or not we’d become Case or Molly Millions ourselves. The reality for most of us, even those of us that pursue a career in software engineering, is that being a hacker in the digital age is not exactly tenable. There is no Matrix as the sole interface of the sum of digital data, in which we can don an avatar and wield a sword to hide our identities. Privacy of identity is already a long forgotten concept, and even those that try to stay off the grid are subject to quick and easy identity searches, GPS tracking, credit card tracing, etc. Even if there were more navigable avenues of invisibility in today’s cyber landscape, humans are by nature cautious, self-preserving, and generally take the path of least resistance. There would be no large scale underground hacker movement lead by Ice-T and a genetically enhanced dolphin without a true existential threat. Those that govern us know this, and have established our lives to be just comfortable enough that the general population has no real reason to start learning Python penetration algorithms or how to break AES encryption in a reasonable time frame. We’ve accepted the digital prisons of our lives as absolute, in our ticky-tacky suburbs and pastel Polos. So as you consume your daily cyberpunk Tumblr feeds, remember that we’re all more like Jill Stingray than Hiro Protagonist. The future is here, there is no revolution, and your bad knee will probably prevent you from ever outrunning any corporation’s private security force.