HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Early last year, the day after the US presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke announced his campaign, the news organisation Reuters uncovered a juicy slice of the politician’s past. When O’Rourke was a teenager, he was a member of a hacktivist group known as “the Cult of the Dead Cow”. Posting on the group’s secretive boards under the name Psychedelic Warlord, he mostly shared his experimental poetry. “Thrust your hooves,” the teenage Beto wrote, “up my analytic passage.”
For years, this is how we understood the dangers of the internet: the lurking threat that everything we’d ever done online – each embarrassing overshare, or misjudged tweet – would come back to haunt us in time. Which, in hindsight, seems charmingly naive: the notion that all we had to worry about
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