David: Also, I don't think they're described as ignoble exactly; Sterling just has a very peculiar way of looking at revolutionaries (especially failed revolutionaries) as if they are somehow quaint.

Alex: I appreciate his honesty; since most of this happened before I was born, it's nice to have a historian who appears (relatively) unbiased. That said, it's fascinating to see the early roots of the geeky hacker fiction I grew up on.

Nate: He's an outsider, looking in. That's my (admittedly uninformed) take on his viewpoint.

Alex: Oh I dunno, near the end of Part 2 our narrator reveals his personal connections to Steve Jackson and some of the cyberpunk authors affected by the eponymous Hacker Crackdown.

David: Well yeah but he's writing about 3 or 4 mutually exclusive extremely insular viewpoints; he SHOULD be writing as an outsider, even when he's not.