Tim May died last month. We hadn’t spoken in at least a lifetime, but he was a daily voice on my screen at a certain time back in the 90s, in the day when the cypherpunks list was not only required reading but a required place to be — a time when at least a few of us at Wired held serious to the idea of Marshall McLuhan as the magazine’s “patron saint.” Those were the days when the net came to me through the full-screen pine mailer inside a Linux shell, at the speed of an ISDN line — one that...