The symbol in the West for the fall of Soviet Russia has been Boris Yeltsin's defiance outside the Russian White House. Technically, his stand was in rebellion against a coup, but it was the rebellion that caught our attention. Our love of rebels lives in the net as well. We love the hackers and the phreakers and the crackers who live in rebellion against the system. Cornellians who remember it still have sympathy for the perpetrator of the Crash of '88, when Morris' Worm brought the entire net to a standstill.
Computers are the symbol of bureaucracy.
That's how I began to hate computers. They represented all that was wrong with Rolling Stone . The personal computer changes that. There are no rebels on the infobahn. We won't get real rebels on the infobahn until computers become an integral part of mainstream life, and we get people on board who have nothing to lose mixing up with people who have everything to lose.