The engineers all read a heavily moderated message board, a news aggregator and discussion site run by the seed accelerator in Mountain View. The message board was frequented by entrepreneurs, tech workers, computer science majors, libertarians, and the people who loved to fight with them. People whose default conversational mode was debate. Mostly men. Men on both sides of the seawall; men all the way down.

It wasn’t for me, but I read it anyway. It struck me as the raw male id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online. The site’s creator had specified that political debate destroyed intellectual curiosity, so political stories, and political conversation, were considered off topic and verboten. Instead, the guidelines asked that users focus on stories that were interesting to hackers. I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted. Whatever; I wasn’t a hacker.