However frustrating it was to be an Internet evangelist in the late 1980s, it beat what I’m feeling now. Following Internet culture – or, better yet, actually participating in it – meant witnessing the birth of a movement as radically novel as psychedelia, punk, or, I liked to imagine, the Renaissance itself.

Here was a ragtag collection of idealistic Californians, bent on wiring up the global brain, one node at a time. Every new account on the WELL — the Bay Area’s pre-eminent online bulletin board, Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link — meant another convert to the great digital hot tub. The struggle of obtaining the computer, the modem, the software, the phone number and the appropriate protocol was a journey of Arthurian proportion. The community you’d find when you’d got there was as political, high-minded, and tightly knit as the Round Table.

Conceived on the bongwater-stained rugs of Reed College dorm rooms, the Apple personal computer bent over backwards to bring even the most stoned of us into the mix. The Macintosh soon became the central metaphor for our collective challenge to God himself. We held more than a forbidden fruit: we had the whole world in our hands. Access was power.

Our arrogance was only matched by our naïvété. Like hippies scheming to dose the city’s reservoir with LSD, Internet enthusiasts took a by-any-means-necessary attitude towards digital enlightenment. Getting a friend to participate in a USENET group was as rewarding to us as scoring a convert is to a Mormon.

And the beauty of it was that we were the freaks! Not just nerds, but deeply and beautifully twisted people from the very fringes of culture had finally found a home. We all had the sense that we were the first settlers of a remote frontier. We had migrated online together in order to create a new society from the ground up.