The fake breach started with mocking tweets and crescendoed with a masked villain disrupting founder Illia Polosukhin to rip on the crypto "pipe dream" and telling viewers "there's nothing waiting for you in Thailand" (where NEAR's holding its hackathon in November). Reverse psychology aside, the marketing stunt makes callbacks to a decades-old character of early digital culture: Max Headroom. What really makes Max memorable today, and notable for the purposes of NEAR's rather cringey gambit, is the broadcast that wasn't supposed to be: the Max Headroom incident.