Throwback image. Someone asked me about the picture currently featuring on the cover of my website. Here it is: a Polaroid taken in Las Vegas in the northern summer of 1997. At the time I was living in Berkeley and working as a tech journalist in San Francisco. Part of my beat was hacking, so I’d attend the Def Con conference in the desert. This was taken during one of those wild weekends.

Looking back, I remember the bullish Utopianism of the tech startups in the 1990s. The internet was going to make everything better.

The hackers — especially groups like Cult of the Dead Cow — weren’t so sure. That’s why they were pushing so hard for individuals to take control of their own technological fate.

The hackers were right.