As that name suggests, over most of the 1990s, going online still had an element of science fiction or fantasy to it. Unlike our day of always-on Internet, back then one "jacked in" or perhaps passed through the back of the family wardrobe, and under a made-up name entered an entirely different kind of world populated by strangers, one where none of the usual rules applied. "Imagine," said the cyber-pioneer John Perry Barlow, "discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions…where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato's cave."

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 984