20 years ago (2003-2006), Welchia, Blaster, Code Red... Windows boxes that weren't patched were infected within about 35 ± 5 seconds when connected to lightly-filtered Internet when it was still a capitalized proper noun. Ask me how I know and used JScript and psexec to mass remote into LAN machines to try to stop some of the madness and downtime.

Oh boy, tell me about it. The first real job I ever had, the first thing I did as a "network engineer" was say "Wow, I've never seen Windows XP machines on the public Internet before. Uh, is it just me or are these all really slow? Like a lot slower than they should be? And what's all this in Task Manager?" 2004 was a different time.

Spoken like someone who knew no one other than fellow practitioners in the field. My God, the 2000s were the Wild West in every kind of way - were you even there to see it? I note you do not say that you were.

That's fine if they weren't. Probably not cool to attack them personally though.

I got started with my first computer as a child over 40 years ago. I'll take the Wild West over the Matrix any day.

That's an interesting contrast, in that the Wild West is a halfway house for Civil War burnouts and the Matrix is a deliberately and expensively constructed and maintained, largely successfully hyperreal simulacrum of what the Wachowskis were astute enough in its own historical moment to recognize as the highwater mark of American hegemony. Oh, it's parasitic, certainly; before it was smoothed over for mass appeal it was I think a story much more obviously inspired by They Live. But a cow can live a long and happy life on a farm, and still end up as cutlets. How unjust can we honestly call that deal?

For you and me, the gunslinger's life has a decided appeal, sure. If that and Buy-n-Large World are the only two options on the table - which so far they have been, though I agree the real answer is to add a better third - can we really say the Matrix isn't the less worse of the two?