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Phreaks differed from hackers in one very important respect: their relationship to the system they were exploring. Today's hackers investigate (or invade, or sabotage) any of the billions of computers that we have connected to the internet, and even early hackers had dozens or hundreds of systems to explore—computer systems used by the military, by insurance giants, by government agencies, by private labs. But for American phreaks, there was really only one adversary: the Bell System, AT&T, the Death Star.

AT&T was a cruel and remorseless monopolist. At the time that Web of Angels was published, the company had been fighting regulators over its monopoly practices for sixty-seven years, and two years later, the DOJ would finally prevail, shattering Ma Bell into several "Baby Bells"—the RBOCs ("are-bocks" or "Regional Bell Operating Companies").

The Bell System was twined around the state. As it predated upon and extinguished smaller phone operators across the country (especially the rural phone co-ops that were the successors to the New Deal's electrification co-ops), it cannily accepted "punishments" that required it to provide universal service across the country, and to ally itself with emergency services and the public safety apparatus, working with local and federal police agencies to develop protocols for criminal surveillance. (Years later, the Snowden revelations would make it clear that AT&T never halted this practice, and that it was far and away the most complicit and active commercial partner in the NSA's illegal mass-surveillance campaign.)

Anti-monopoly enforcers seek to guard the state from corporate power growing so strong that it usurps the power of the state. AT&T's shrewd strategy was to accept "punishments" that caused it to become a deputized arm of the state, the original too-big-to-fail American company. The DOJ almost broke up AT&T in the early 1950s, but then the Pentagon stepped in to rescue it, arguing that the US military could not effectively prosecute the war in Korea if AT&T was not left intact to serve as toolsmith to the US invasion force.

AT&T was thus rehabilitated from a predatory monopolist to a national champion, a guardian of safety and security. This, in turn, transformed the parasites, explorers, wreckers, and builders who trespassed upon its authorities into threats to public safety, to the national interest itself. AT&T's enforcers found enthusiastic allies in the American criminal justice system, who aggressively policed AT&T's network policies on their behalf. A 1981 episode of WKRP in Cincinnati features a comedic meltdown by Dr. Johnny Fever, who breaks a Western Electric phone and flies into a panic at the thought that "the phone cops" are coming to drag him away. The joke was not really a joke: phone cops and real cops worked together to break down doors and drag away "toll thieves" who figured out how to beat the company's high-margin long-distance rates.

The crime of "toll fraud" really amounted to "felony contempt of monopoly," but AT&T had a winning strategy for disguising its parochial interest in maintaining its monopoly pricing and control over telephone handsets, by conflating the organized crime syndicates that systematized toll fraud with the kids and weirdos who set up free conference calls and the basement inventors who created tone-generating boxes that let them defeat long-distance tolls.

It was a profitable sleight of hand for AT&T, one that provided cover and government support to harass, demonize, and even imprison the early phreaks.

Indeed, the first salvo in the hacker wars that were to come was fired by AT&T, when it sicced the FBI on some phreaker-cum-hackers who had posted a bureaucratic document describing the management of a local 911 system and sparked a nationwide wave of arrests, as documented in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown.

The FBI's Hacker Crackdown marked a turning point, and not just in law enforcement's relationship to the anti-authoritarian, high-tech underground, but in that underground itself. Phone phreaks operated an oral culture—inevitably, since the fundamental unit of phreak social interaction was the phone call. Phreaks learned to be phreaks from other phreaks, and mentor-protégé relationships were common.

The Hacker Crackdown concerned an article published in Phrack, the seminal hacker e-zine that was founded in 1985—five years after Web of Angels (2600: The Hacker Quarterly commenced publication in 1984). The rise of BBSes and their archives of "tfiles" (text files filled with bragadocious accounts of daring hacker exploits, as well as manifestos and lies) and e-zines represented a profound shift in the hacker's journey.

With these files to hand, a hacker wasn't nearly so reliant on mentors: these documents (along with the painstakingly retyped internal documentation harvested from the dumpsters of Ma Bell, IBM, and other tech giants) were the raw materials of a self-directed study program, albeit one supplemented by online forums and chats, and the odd hacker get-together. (Phreaks 'did' have some written culture, notably the Youth International Party Line—later changed to TAP—published by Abbie Hoffman and Al Bell in the early 1970s.)

The thing that makes Web of Angels such a book of its time—and so definitively a cousin to cyberpunk, rather than an ancestor—is how much of a phreak book it is.

Its protagonist, Grailer Diomede, learns to be a "Webspinner" after he is taken under the arm of a much more accomplished spinner. Their mutual adversary is Bell Stellar, a galactically metastatic version of Ma Bell, one that has actually devoured the state that once protected it, winning for itself the right to deal out lethal retaliation to anyone who threatens the integrity of the network that binds the distant worlds together.