In early Cyberpunk zine culture, "console cowboys" were actually coding real viruses… and mailing them. Before the Internet was widely accessible, members of the cyberpunk subculture—especially in the 1980s and early '90s—shared code through printed zines and floppy disks sent through the mail. One underground zine, Phrack, was infamous not only for hacker manifestos and phreaking tutorials, but also for distributing source code for malware, cloaked as “educational tools.”

Even more bizarre: some hackers role-played as the “console cowboys” of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, signing their code drops with Matrix-inspired aliases and referencing imaginary cyberspace architecture like "ICE walls" and "black ICE"—long before VR even remotely resembled fiction.

So yes, long before TikTok-core, “hacktivism”, or NFT punks, Cyberpunks were literally mailing viruses across state lines, wrapped in techno-utopian anarchism and ASCII art.