Tron-pilled
I didn’t know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to “red-teaming” – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried “blue-teaming,” trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it.
I didn’t know the term “blue-teaming” then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: “Tron-pilled.” Tron “fought for the user.” Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn’t clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having.