The Internet operates on a funny sort of logic, promising active networking and communication yet in reality exacerbating our primal instincts to curl up like a pill bug into a big ball of ourselves. Even in its nascent stages it became an exponentially simpler method of bypassing the usual avenues of interaction. If we wanted to find new people we no longer had to slog through the cocktail party circuit or risk catastrophic blind dates or awkward meetings with friends of friends, friends of relatives, relatives of friends. We didn’t have to expand our social circles one sad little concentric step at a time. We no longer had to run through the checklist of pre-approved small talk bullet points and throwaway questions about who people were, where they were from, what sort of music they were into in the hopes of finding some thread of mutual passion upon which we could capitalize. The Internet eliminated all that bother by allowing us to plug directly into whatever we were searching for. With message boards, chat rooms, and user groups dedicated to specific subsets of culture and technology we were relieved of the burden of having to explain ourselves. The people who cohabitated our little corners of the Web knew why we were there; they became our new friends by default. We didn’t need to swap life stories. It wasn’t necessary to know the why or how of them, only that, in those strange early days of the Net, we found others who liked the same weird crap we liked, and it was enough.