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To be a tech worker in 2025 could mean one of two things.

On one hand, there are "normies."

They lead ordinary lives as people who just happen to work in the tech industry. Sometimes, they work from home. At work, they use Slack, HubSpot, and Gmail; outside of work, they use Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads. They think X is fringe and read the New York Times and TechCrunch.

But there's another breed of tech worker that operates in the shadows. They are variously called shut-ins, NEETs, or ghost engineers, but they couldn't have less in common with the normies.

These are Netizens. They work remotely with colleagues whose faces they have never seen. They use Discord, Proton Mail, and private repos. They debate among themselves in corners of the web that normies dare not tread, such as Gab, Telegram, and Matrix. They survive off the flourishing digital economy, and have little regard for institutional finance. They are not employees to anybody, but contractors, freelancers, or consultants, and they have varying preferences for whether they earn in crypto or in fiat.

They are easy to overlook, or even to write off. This is a mistake.

These netizens are increasingly influential in ways we don't immediately recognize. They control meme accounts on social media. They maintain consensus protocols of different blockchains. They edit Wikipedia. On at least one occasion, they have swung an election.

This book sheds light on the dark corners of the internet, and the shadow class that builds it. It dives deep into virtual worlds and metaverses, to show just how bizarre things truly are.

This book is for the normies.