Is Gambit here just for a gratuitous sales-bump?

My main local comic shop has a spinner rack they salt with dollar comics, and sometimes they load it up with crap of course I'm going to buy, even if I just ended up buying Daredevil #327 again...from 1994, Daredevil #330, "Tree of Knowledge, part 4: Disinformocracy" Written by D.G. Chichester, pencils by Scott McDaniel, inks by Hector Collazo and Rich Rankin.

Gambit gets the guest-spot on the cover, but he's not in this for very long: Daredevil is still fighting System Crash, a high-tech HYDRA team. Gambit had told the X-Men he was heading into town "for some jambalaya" and said he'd check it out; and appreciates how the "new" armored DD is seen with more distrust than he probably deserves. Meanwhile, Karen Page has been approached by her old porn producers, about making newfangled interactive smut, which probably would've been point-and-click back then; but she also finds hidden, probably illegal pictures on their disc. Elektra has ordered a fancy dinner for Matt, who shows up late and also doesn't seem to be in the mood: that seems unlikely...And at a local S.H.I.E.L.D. branch, Nick Fury can't get the cyborg-y parts out of John Garrett: he isn't willing to kill him in cold blood, but doesn't want him just running around doing whatever, so he gives him a "babysitter," the cyborg Siege. (I like him! I always hear the old dial-up modem noise when he shows up...)

"Jack Batlin" is getting a new building-slash-jungle gym; and has a brief discussion with a media professor about "the 'computerization' of the public," which comtemplates but isn't even close about how online the average person was going to get. Later, in disguise at a "wetware rave," Captain America and Daredevil continue that vein of discussion: Cap presents a very G-rated, "Jeffersonian ideal" of what the internet could be, while DD plays "Devil's advocate" with a darker vision. Neither were very predictive of what actually happened, although Chichester seems to guess money-laundering would be a big part of cybercrime. Really think Cap and DD's rave costumes deserved more page time then they got: Cap with product in his hair is somehow simulataneously both unrecognizable and unmistakable. And downtown, information activist Spectrum is visited in jail by one of System Crash's killers, but possibly only with a job offer...

Yeesh, I think I skipped mentioning at least two more subplots: Foggy Nelson gets approached by Wilson Fisk's radio station, WFET, about working for them; which would be like working for an even sleazier Fox. And Baron Strucker spars with some of System Crash: they don't seem very unified, and Strucker seems fed up with their nerdery. But for the next couple issues, all these plots and possibly more get like two or three pages each, which paradoxically feels like too little and too much. (Actually, Karen's plot doesn't go super-far: she goes to the cops the next issue, and they're even less helpful than you'd expect, as the officer remembers her from porn.) This whole thing wants to be industrial and cyberpunk, and it totally is! Like Billy Idol's Cyberpunk. That thing was dated when it came out...OK, "Shock to the System" isn't a bad track, but still. In other news, I haven't loved the last couple new issues of Daredevil, as the ongoing Hand/Punisher storyline is wearing thin for me. Among other things, I'm worried Elektra will be out of her DD suit before her figure gets here...