"Our popular culture of the present moment is permeated with nostalgia for earlier iterations of the web, stories of a time when the internet was the milieu of the weird — of “wizards and geeks,” in the words of a 2006 Pew report. Yet these fictional expressions of internet nostalgia are often less concerned with real encounters with the past than with an imagined past that soothes our anxieties about the present — a vision of the internet that never really existed. Depictions of the internet from the 1980s — most obviously William Gibson’s matrix, and Tron — imagined an expansive, topological world more visual than textual, a parallel universe or alternate dimension."