Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot | h+ Magazine

“Almost exactly a century later, in the first flush of the Digital Revolution (©Wired magazine), the cephalopod archetype resurfaced. This time, however, the semiotic polarities were reversed: the mythic image that gave shape to fears of Homo cyberneticus deformed by his overreliance on technology into a posthuman freak — his body “shriveled to nothing, a dangling degraded pendant” to his overdeveloped brain, as Wells put it — now embodied the cultural values of the hacker class (codeword: geek).  […] a big-brained mollusk with a sci-fi pedigree seemed right for the zeitgeist.”