From Floppy Disks to the Cyber Monster: How the Internet Changed Us
It all really began with my boys in the basement.
I didn’t know them, not properly. There was no glossy “About Us” page, no mission statement written by a marketing department, no stock photos of smiling executives with their arms folded. Just a small overseas outfit that felt as though a handful of clever young blokes had commandeered a few servers, plugged them in somewhere underground, and decided to see what they could build.
They answered emails. Actual emails. If something broke, someone fixed it. If you had a problem, you weren’t funnelled into a system...you spoke to a person. Even then, I sensed it mattered that there were names at the other end, not departments. That if something went wrong, responsibility lived somewhere human.
You weren’t funnelled into a system - you spoke to a person.
At the time, it didn’t feel remarkable. It was simply how things were.
The internet itself felt like that too.
It was the late 1990s in Australia. I wandered into a newsagency - the proper sort, selling papers, magazines, and the odd birthday card- and spotted a computer magazine with a floppy disk taped to the cover. “30 days free dial-up!” it promised.
That was it. No contracts. No data harvesting clauses. No fine print worth worrying about. Just a disk and a sense of curiosity.
I took it home, slid it into my old DOS computer, and waited. Then came that unforgettable sound: the screeching, beeping, hissing symphony as the modem handshaked its way into another world. A sound that announced connection, but also limitation. You knew when you were online. You knew when you weren’t. And heaven help you if someone picked up the phone.
You knew when you were online. You knew when you weren’t
There were no apps. No feeds. No endless scroll. You typed addresses you’d been given or stumbled from one clumsy link to another, never quite sure where you’d land. Pages loaded slowly, line by line, like a curtain being drawn back inch by inch. It forced patience. You didn’t click lightly because every click cost time....and sometimes money.
Looking back, that slowness acted as a kind of natural brake. You thought before you acted. You chose when to connect. And just as importantly, you chose when to stop.
Options in Australia were limited. OzEmail was the big name, the pioneering ISP that Malcolm Turnbull helped turn from a modest operation into a national force. People joked that he’d “invented the internet in Australia,” though in truth he simply recognised its potential early. Telstra BigPond followed, and before long the internet was no longer a curiosity - it was a product.
But I wandered off elsewhere. Off to my boys in the basement.
Somehow, I found a scrappy UK provider. They weren’t slick. They didn’t feel big. They felt like people learning as they went, fixing problems because problems needed fixing, not because a policy demanded it. When dial-up gave way to broadband, they adapted. When hosting evolved, they grew with it. The basement boys became LiquidNet Ltd., then ResellersPanel.com - a global operation by any measure.
And yet, they never quite lost the old instinct: the customer is a person, not a resource.
I stayed with them through crashes, rebuilds, late-night panics, and the slow realisation that the internet itself was changing shape. Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a place you visited and became something that followed you around.
What had begun as a tool quietly turned into an environment. Then into a marketplace. Then into a system that no longer asked whether you wished to participate. It was all terribly convenient. Faster. Smoother. Always on.
The price was no longer measured in phone bills or monthly fees. It was measured in patterns, preferences, habits. In pieces of ourselves given away so gradually we barely noticed the transaction.
Years later, when an issue arose involving my site and privacy, I asked my basement boys if they would comment publicly. It would have been easy for them. A neat little public relations moment. Exposure costs nothing these days.
They refused.
No statement. No quote. No carefully worded paragraph. My privacy, they said - quietly, without drama - was not theirs to trade.
That refusal explained something I’d felt for years but never quite named.
Loyalty, real loyalty, isn’t built on rewards or clever incentives. It grows out of trust - the quiet confidence that the person on the other end will do the right thing even when nobody is watching.
My basement boys never treated me like a ticket number or a data point. They didn’t need scripts or slogans about “customer experience.” They simply behaved as though people mattered more than exposure, and the relationship followed naturally.
I have stayed with them through decades of change not because they dazzled me, but because they never tried to use me.
It struck me then how rare that feeling has become - not just online, but everywhere. So many modern systems, public and private alike, no longer seem designed to serve so much as to process. You move through forms, portals, queues, and policies, nudged along by systems that work perfectly well - just not for you.
You comply, you submit, you wait. And somewhere along the way, the sense that someone is actually responsible quietly disappears.
In a world that shares everything by default, that refusal felt almost shocking. And in that moment, I realised what had been lost along the way. Not technology, but restraint. Not connection, but discretion. The understanding that silence can sometimes be the most ethical choice of all.
And that is when the shape of the thing finally becomes clear.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped being users and became inputs. What began as a tool we switched on became a system that never switches off. It does not rage or threaten or announce itself. It simply watches, learns, and waits. The beast that never sleeps isn’t evil, and it isn’t accidental - it is wide awake because it feeds on attention, habit, and distraction. It didn’t force its way into our lives. We invited it in, one small permission at a time, and forgot what it felt like to close the door.
We didn’t lose control of the internet - it learned to live without our consent. Much like our government really.
Monty
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