“Every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming jerking off, streaming endless garbage… Meantime hashlingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handling more and more of it over to the bad guys… They get us, all right we’re all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us… We’re being played… and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet – the real one, the dream, the promise – is destroyed.”

— ‘Eric’ in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge