It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.
“I think one of the things that I see when I look back at my earlier work is a struggle to recognize and accept that the heart is the master and the head is the servant, and that that is always the case, except when it isn’t the case we’re in deep, deep trouble. That’s the way it looks to me now when I look back on it, but I wasn’t able to articulate that twenty years ago.”
— William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories