It was the underground hackers and revolutionaries of the early twenty-first century that led humanity into the modern era.
The loosely confederated groups of the discontented and the angry gathered under the banner of the sixteen-century English revolutionary Guy Fawkes, and began to organise against the corporatocracy which had ruled for three centuries.
The group, which called itself Anonymous, orchestrated cyber attacks against the pillars of power of that era, the lenders, the government agencies, and the multinationals.
Little did the industrial financial complex know as it gathered its defences against these attacks that the new age which would overwhelm it had already begun.
It was these fighters who, as they coded and programmed against the system, would clear a path to the modern world.
History does not record the exact moment when they built the first bridge into the digital universe. The insurgency had spilled out onto the streets of America and Europe as the first group of hackers stepped across the void and the new world began.

The Hollywood propaganda machine became so adept that most people at the turn of the third millennium had no idea they lived in a waking dream.
The film stars became the avatars of their unconsciousness, ideals to which they constantly compared themselves to and tried to bend their lives to emulate.
Divided and self-obsessed, they remained silent as the cyber industrial complex insinuated itself into the shell of their democratic systems.
Their power slipped away as they somnambulated through their imaginary lives among the movie stars. People were barely aware of each other, comatosing in front of their televised boxes, or walking the shopping malls and gymnasiums that had become the songlines of their dreaming.
The normalcy to which they aspired was an artificial one which had been constructed in the heart of the propaganda machine.
The Hollywood blockbusters which were beamed into their homes every night would indoctrinate them with a normality of apathy and obedience, their characters striving to attain the ideal of suburbanity.
Every film would be assigned a special military advisor, an agent of the cyber industrial complex, to ensure that the message was in line with the demands of the regime.
Values of obedience and conformity were constantly reinforced. The ideals which were repeatedly suggested to the populace were of contented isolation.
The heroes of the Hollywood films would preoccupy themselves with the details of their daily lives, happy to leave the authority of the state and the industrial system unchallenged and unopposed.
In this way, the populace whiled away their lives in isolation, absorbed in their own beauty and in the consumption of retail goods, unaware of the darkness that was about to fall.