#201 – Marc Benzakein on How Life Has Changed During the Internet Era

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how life has changed during the internet era.

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So on the podcast today, we have Marc Benzakein. Marc’s story is one that spans nearly the entire history of the internet, with roots reaching back to the mid nineties. He explores, how curiosity and an enthusiastic embrace of technology led him from running a small coffee importing business, accepting payments by snail mail, fax, then email, to helping wire up schools for internet access when modems worked incredibly slowly, and only a handful of people were online.

This episode is a departure from our usual topic about plugins, themes, and WordPress community news. Instead, we are more in the business of reminiscing this week, taking a reflective walk down memory lane to look at how the internet has evolved, not just as a technology, but as an integral part of society that’s transformed how we work, communicate, and think.

Marc shares some personal stories, building bulletin board systems, forging long distance friendships over phone lines and slow modems, and watching as internet access shifted from an intentional, difficult to navigate hobby for a few, to an invisible always on utility that we all take for granted.

We talk about how technology has affected not only business and productivity, often creating more work instead of less, but also our attention spans, expectations around entertainment, the pace of life, and even the social fabric that binds us together.

We discuss the cultural shifts that came with always connected living, digital minimalism, and the recent push by younger generations to step back from tech and reclaim a bit of analog life.

We chat about the early optimism of open standards, the rise of walled gardens and social networks, and the challenges of regulation, commercialisation, and the balancing act between freedom and responsibility online.

Marc’s perspective is shaped by decades of direct technical experience, as well as thoughtful observations of how technology is reshaping the world around us, sometimes for the better, sometimes in ways we need to pause and question.

Whether you are nostalgic for the old days of dial up, intrigued by how the internet’s culture has shifted, or curious about how these transformations might play out as new technologies like AI reshape society, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Marc Benzakein.

I am joined on the podcast by Marc Benzakein. Hello, Marc.

[00:03:44] Marc Benzakein: Hello, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. This is going to be an episode unlike one I think we’ve ever done on the WP Tavern podcast. Because usually we have a conversation about, I don’t know, a plugin, a theme, a community idea, something along those lines. And today we’re just going to do memory lane. We’re going to go hand in hand down memory lane.

I think Marc’s memory lane is a little bit longer than my memory lane because it’s all about the internet and the way we’ve been using it and how it’s evolved and all of that. So if you’ve got an expectation of a plugin show, this is not the one for you. This is going to be a little bit different.

So before we crack in properly and have that conversation, Marc, would you just sort of paint the picture a little bit about your bio? Maybe go back right to the beginning of your experiences on the internet. When did you first get online and all that kind of stuff?

[00:04:30] Marc Benzakein: So I want to go back to, I think it was 1995 or 1996. There was a, of course people hear about, and it still exists, AOL and things like that. And then there was Prodigy. I got involved as a user of the internet with a company called Netcom. And it was kind of one of the first true internet service providers that I knew of at the time. It wasn’t like, it didn’t have like this interface and kind of guide you through where you needed to go and everything. You had to use things like Gopher, and you had to do research in order to be able to use the internet.

I of course, became fascinated with it always being a, kind of a tech head or just curious. I’m just infinitely curious. It doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t have to be technology. It can be anything and I find it, like I said, I’m infinitely curious and that leads to distractions sometimes, but it also leads me down paths that I never would’ve thought.

And while I was working on the internet, so this was at a time that I was actually importing coffee from Africa. So yeah, so related. So related. And I had actually made some pretty good money with the coffee business. I was doing the email thing. I had like my three friends who had email addresses and we were like, oh, this is cool. Look at this, instant gratification. And I thought, man, it sure would be cool to see what this looks like from the other side of things. Because I have no clue how any of this works.

And so curious thing happened with the coffee company. I was importing from a country called Burundi in Africa. Some people know where it is, some people don’t. I actually never visited, but my uncle was actually a big shot in the agriculture department there which is how I had the connection to be able to import coffee into the United States. They had a lot of civil and political unrest, and essentially burned the coffee fields. And my uncle fled the country because it had become so dangerous.

So one day I’m, basically I had set up a system in which I import the coffee, it goes to a distributor. Once a month I would go out to the mailbox and collect a cheque. And that was my job. It was the easiest thing I ever did, once I got the system built. And so, lo and behold, civil unrest and all that, which was just awful by the way, but I’m out of business because I can’t import coffee from Burundi. And I was really young, and probably not smart enough to think, maybe I should back this up with other countries too.

But coincidentally, a person that I had gone to high school with, they built computers for schools and things like that, so they had some government contracts and things like that. And they had this crazy idea that they wanted to connect schools to the internet. And they wanted to give them high speed access. Now, keep in mind that back in these days we’re talking about 14.4K, it was, well, we thought it was fast at the time. You know, you had US robotics with their HST standard. And we thought that we were doing well, but most people were actually on 24 hundreds back then.

So if you can imagine that, 2,400 baud modems. I remember it like it was a meal ago. I mean it was just crazy. And so now, I was like importing coffee and I was trying to figure out what to do next and Greg Franklin, who I have partnered with since like the eighties, we’ve been through a lot. We were partners at ServerPress. We’ve been through it all. He and I, you know, we were always good friends. And he says, hey, I’m going to work with Phil and Steve on this internet thing, and it’d be kind of cool if you help me out because I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m like, well, I have no clue what I’m doing either. And he said, yeah, but between the two of us, we can figure it out.

So the idea was, they had already set up, Phil and Steve, who were the other partners in this company, they had set up digital ISDN access. Now, ISDN, let’s see, what did that stand for? Something, something, digital network.

[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: I can’t remember what the acronym stood for, but it was banded around a lot, I remember that.

[00:08:36] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And what made it fantastic was you had a modem, okay, but it was kind of on demand. So when your computer sent out a network request that was outside of your internal network, which nobody had home internal networks back then. You know, if they had a computer, that was it, right? Back then, internal networks were things like, there was like LANtastic was one of them, and then there was Novell networking and all that stuff. So it was like that token ring network stuff, right? Okay. So you have to go way back, right? So I can’t believe I’m remembering some of these terms because it’s been so long.

[00:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember all of the ways that they could be connected. I remember seeing the, you know, you’d read through TCP IP documentation and there’d be diagrams of computers connected with T cables all in circles because that was the most efficient way to connect them all. Oh gosh, you’ve taken me back.

[00:09:26] Marc Benzakein: It wasn’t just the most efficient way, it was, if any part of that ring broke, the whole network broke down. You had have it, you know? So this concept of plugging into a switch or a router or something like that was like completely, pardon the pun, but completely novel. Not Novell, novel.

[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Novell, yeah, very good. Very good.

[00:09:48] Marc Benzakein: So I built a lot of token ring systems for local businesses and things like that, but nobody had a network at home. They generally, at most had one computer at home. And when they wanted to go online, I should go back even before that, I used to run a bulletin board service, a BBS, which was even more ridiculous than a 2,400 baud modem.

[00:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: This was when there were like three people in the United States online.

[00:10:14] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And essentially I would have my computer, I was living in an apartment at the time. I would have my computer set up and only one person could connect at a time to my computer, which was set up with this BBS software on it. And they would play games. I had downloads of different files and things like that. I was the first BBS in our region to have a one gigabyte SCSI hard drive. And so I became very, obviously my BBS became very popular, not because I offered anything incredible, but because I had a one gigabyte hard drive.

[00:10:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you had the badge of honor.

[00:10:48] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And word spread quickly and all that. In the old fashioned ways, which was carrier pigeons and things like that.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. There was no, yeah, or the bulletin board.

[00:10:57] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, or the bulletin, yeah. And I think that was probably where I got kind of this taste of like how cool it could be because I would modify my own stuff. So I would, we used a bulletin board software called WWIV. It was all C++ coded. And there was this guy that somehow I found, I don’t even know, in Virginia. His name was Tony. And he and I got to be really good friends because he ran a bulletin board system too in Virginia and I’m in California. And we would get on phone calls, long distance mind you. If you remember what long distance was.

We would talk for hours and this guy was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. I mean we would, he would just call me up to tell me, we got to the point where he’d just call me up to tell me jokes and we would just laugh for hours. But he was in the military. He worked on the helicopters that flew George Bush senior around. He was in the Marines.

And we met up one time because he flew out to California. But that’s a whole side story. So that’s where I got started. And then I invested in a US Robotics 14.4 HST modem. So I could do, yeah, 14,400K per second, which was like, I don’t know what the time of $500 modem or something ridiculous like that.

[00:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve suddenly taken your computer onto the highway instead of being stuck on back lanes.

[00:12:16] Marc Benzakein: Right. So not only did I have my one gigabyte SCSI drive, but I also had high speed BBS connection.

[00:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: You got all the bling that you can have.

[00:12:26] Marc Benzakein: I had all the bling on my 286 computer. It might have been a 486, I don’t know. I don’t remember the computer. But what was funny was like you would sit there, we’d be watching TV and I’d hear my modem go off because someone would be connecting to the BBS. I would drop what I was doing just so that I could go and see what they were doing, right? Because at my end I could see everything that people were doing, so on top of it all. That was probably my foray into the internet, even though I didn’t realise it at the time.

[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: Although for a proportion of the listeners, they’ll be kind of nodding their head and going, oh yeah, all of the things that you described make perfect sense. I guess for a significant proportion of the audience, all of this will sort of sound like a mystery. But hopefully you’ll have got some impression, deal listener, the internet as we now know it, where it’s ubiquitous, it really is everywhere. You know, you’ve got a connection if you’re walking down the street with your cellular network and what have you.

In the part of the world, certainly where I live, and I imagine where you live, there’s no real black spot where the internet does not really exist. And everything’s really straightforward. You buy a device from a shop, turn it on and it connects almost immediately. And yet that really wasn’t the case. It was kind of like more pioneering days. Most things didn’t work, but it was a heck of a lot of fun, and a heck of a lot hobbying. So more of actually. Now that I think about it, that’s the best way to phrase it. It was a hobby, things to do.

[00:13:48] Marc Benzakein: It absolutely was a hobby. Very few of us actually had, well, I don’t think any of us had the foresight that the internet would become what it is right now. At least none of the people in my circles. I think it was, it would be the equivalent of like being a Ham radio operator. You know, it’s kind of the same sort of thing. You kind of felt like you were part of this like little elite group of people who understood how it worked and could make it work, and it made you feel special. And for those of us who grew up kind of being that nerd in high school and things like that, and especially back in the seventies and eighties when, I mean I went to school, there were only three people who even knew how to use a keyboard on a computer. And of course we, I mean they made a fricking movie called Revenge of the Nerds. They made fun of us.

It’s amazing that we haven’t had, well, I think a lot of us have had to go through years and years and years of therapy. And I think that I just probably deflected a lot of that sort of treatment of nerds with like a very sharp tongue and a, you know, a very, I would laugh at it and things like that. So that was kind of my coping mechanism probably. And I probably have some trauma from all that that I don’t even remember. But there’s probably something there, but that’s a whole other show. We can talk about that another time.

[00:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the fact that it was a hobby and also the fact that, so my recollections start a little bit later than yours, but we’re not like a whole decade out of kilter. I think you definitely started at times where I can remember some of that stuff. You certainly got the march on me. But nevertheless, I don’t think in my estimation I had any conception that it would grow beyond a thing that hobbyists did.

So I think it was always going to remain this sort of niche hobby thing. Maybe some sort of place where you would communicate with a handful of people, and that handful of people would be, you know, equally nerdy in the same way that you or I were. But no expectation that it would be adopted en masse. No expectation that every single human being would have some sort of device, either that they’re walking around with or just in their home or anything like that.

And so I think, looking back, I predicted it would just be this hobby thing and would never grow into anything else. And so it was just a bit of a lark, a bit of fun. Something that you’d put away from time, you know, you would set it down, go and do your regular day, then come back. There was no email, nothing like that. So you could safely put it away and then come back to it.

I look back on it very fondly. It’s almost like halcyon days. And so many things that the internet has been connected with, and is connected with now are fabulous, but there’s also a lot of downsides which have come serendipitously along the way as well. Nobody foresaw those either. So I think, like I say, it was sort of halcyon days. Just this notion that it would be, I don’t know, unicorns and rainbows all the way down.

[00:16:33] Marc Benzakein: Right. The closest prediction that I had made back then was I said, you know, one day we are all going to be connected. But I thought it was going to be one of these kind of like, we go on and we intentionally connect with each other, not like we’re always connected all the time kind of thing. Of course I was young and quite the gamer at the time. I said, here’s what’s going to happen is, I predict that one day games will exist where we keep all the files on our own systems, and the only thing that’s being transmitted to each other is just data to like, so we can like play together all at the same time in these games.

That was my prediction and people would laugh at me. And now of course it’s gone way, way, way beyond that. But every once in a while I’m like, see, I told them and I did nothing about it. I just knew it was going to happen and I did nothing about it.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: I remember when I was at school, sitting in a physics class, and I for some reason got sat next to probably the nerdiest nerd I’ve ever met. I won’t name him, but he is still very nerdy. He really was like on the extreme end of interested in all of this kind of stuff. And I remember we got into a conversation once where he said, do you know what I think is going to happen in the future? I think you’ll be able to, so we still had cathode ray tellies, so you’d turn the tele on, you’d wait for three minutes for the TV to warm up, and then the picture would slowly appear. And that was the level that we were at, and you had to walk over and press a button on the screen if you want to change it between the four channels or three channels that were available in the UK at the time.

[00:18:01] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, the kids were the remotes back in those days.

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. We were literally, either that or a big stick that you could try and prod from the sofa. But he said to me, in the future we’ll have televisions that are just connected to computers somehow, and we’ll pick what we want to watch, and we won’t have to just watch what’s provided to us. We’ll be able to say, I’d like that now, and this now, and watch this film now. And he just predicted this future. And I remember sitting there thinking, that’s never going to happen.

Now that’s kind of like the starting gate for children growing up in this era. That’s like the basic provision. If you haven’t got, you know, the computer switched on and the TV and the music and the radio and all of that on demand, yeah, that’s not life, that’s just some sort of poor version of life. It’s so interesting how it’s transformed what we expect.

[00:18:55] Marc Benzakein: It’s funny because, yeah, you hear the kids being like, what do you mean you had to wait till Tuesday night at eight o’clock in order to watch? And if you didn’t see it, you’d miss it completely. What do you mean by that?

[00:19:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But even map that further back and, you know, you go back a whole generation or a generation and a half prior to you and I, even the notion that you could watch anything on a box in a house, what do you mean, the theater? Somebody brought the theater to your house. Well, yeah, kind of, in a little box. What, they shrunk the people down? How? It’s insane.

And yet, every single generation, this is now the assumption. The technology of the magnitude that we’ve got now, and the complexity that we’ve got now, and the miniaturisation that we’ve got now, this is now the benchmark for the beginning of the next generation. And it’s so interesting watching it happen.

I don’t know what you feel. I’m probably jumping ahead because I want to go back and talk about some of the things which have gone wrong. But what’s your, do you see yourself fully able to engage with all of the new things that are happening?

So we’re in the year, we’re at the very, very end of 2025 and, you know, we’ve got things like AI. We’ve had all sorts of interesting things happening. And I do wonder, for me at least anyway, I do wonder if there’s a point in time where it just races ahead at such a speed that somebody like me really does genuinely struggle to kind of keep up. I don’t know if you’ve got the same intuitions.

[00:20:13] Marc Benzakein: I actually think everybody does. I think that kids do too. I just think that kids are focused, for instance, on what’s important to them. And they’re at a different point in their life, so what’s important to them is not important to us. And so the technology that’s important to them like, say for instance, TikTok or whatever, is just an example, right? I only care about TikTok insofar as, what can it do to boost my brand? Or something like that.

Although it is interesting that kids are interested in boosting their brand on TikTok and they’re kids. But that’s, they may not realise that that’s what they’re doing, but that’s what they’re doing. But as far as technologies go, I think we just tend to use a technology, I think we’ve reached an age where, with the exception of maybe teleportation, we really feel like, if I can think this, we can do this. And so we just kind of like, now we’re just like, okay, I want to do this, what do I have to do in order to do it? Not, that’s impossible. You know, I think we’ve crossed over that hump of things being impossible.

[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: I remember sitting in the car with my children. So this is going back several years now. I mean quite, maybe a decade or more. And I remember my child asking to play a certain song on the car radio. I said to him, we don’t have that. And he looked at me and he said, what do you mean we don’t have it? Because the setup that I had in the car still required compact disks. You know, the old CD player. You would put the CD in and so the arrangement of CDs that we had in the car was the available catalog of songs.

But he could not get over, unavailable. What? What do you mean? I mean, genuinely, it was a real moment where he had to think, the song is bound to that round thing. It’s not just coming out of the ether somehow. And that was quite a profound moment for me thinking, wow, your world is a lot bigger than mine, well, smaller and bigger at the same time, but your expectations are so different to what mine were when I grew up.

[00:22:10] Marc Benzakein: I think that, oh, I mean I hate to sound like, oh, kids today, but kids today, I mean they barely know what an iPod is. And how long ago was that? That wasn’t even that long ago. Because it’s like, what, you had to download your music onto this device? Yeah, because it could hold more music than a CD. For us, the iPod was groundbreaking, right? But I remember the first time I could put music on my phone and I was like, oh, this is awesome. I don’t even, once again, I don’t even know why we call them phones anymore. I hardly ever use it to talk to people.

[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your pocket computer.

[00:22:40] Marc Benzakein: It’s way more powerful than anything I ever had in the past. I think because kids are in a constant state of having to adapt anyway, that’s just what growing up is, is a constant state of adaptation. I think that it’s easier for them. I do find that I’m a little bit slower or I might be just more selective. I might just be like, you know, this doesn’t interest me. And it may this be like I’m becoming more and more, get off my lawn as I get older. Or it may be that I’ve always, even back when we started the internet service provider, my feeling was that we have all this power at our hands and we are still children when it comes to us as a society and our ability to be responsible.

[00:23:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a curious insight isn’t it?

[00:23:28] Marc Benzakein: Technology has always been kind of a double-edged sword for me. It’s amazing what you can do, but going back to the coffee days, I remembered how the speed of business changed for me because we had fax machines. And so I would fax to the people in Burundi because we would, coffee would go to auction. I’d have to bid on it and, you know, get the lot and then have it shipped over here. And the next morning I would, you know, because of the time difference, I would send them a fax in my morning and then the next morning I’d have a fax from them.

And we’re talking about not even 10 years ago, everything had to be done by courier and things like that. And it would be days and days and days before you got information or you’d have to make a phone call. And so that was like the first part of, you could sign contracts in a fax machine. And then we got email, which became even more instantaneous. And as a result, going back to like when personal computers came into our homes, a big part of it was, hey, these things, well, you can do in two hours, what you used to be able to do it eight hours.

And I very quickly learned that nobody was working a two hour day once technology came into our homes. In fact, people were not only bringing their work home, but they were working 14 and 16 hour days. And my thought, I was probably 18 or 20 years old, and my thought even at that time was like, we are not responsible enough to have this kind of technology at our fingertips. And I still feel that way. And so I’ve always struggled with this like, we have technology but we do not have the ability to limit ourselves or to discipline ourselves to say, okay, but how much is actually enough here?

[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s really curious. It’s not something I dwell on a lot, but when you say it, it makes perfect sense. It’s not like the amount of work that we were doing 50 years ago, the amount that needs to be done objectively is the same now than it was then. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the amount of work always fills up the available time.

And so this promise, which has been offered in multiple generations over hundreds of years, you know, you can go back to the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution, just the idea that the technology will free up time. Clearly it does, but I think it’s true to say that other things occupy that time because there’s an efficiency gained over here. Well, that leaves you a little bit of time to do this extra other task over here. And because everybody’s bound up to the technology, everybody has this available time, which they then fill up. And so the cycle begins.

And in many ways, I feel exactly like you’ve just described. Instead of going from an eight hour day, the fact that we’ve got the technology in our homes and we can check the email during the middle of the night, and so on and so forth, I think it is entirely possible that the workday could be longer now than it ever has been. I mean not for everybody, and not all the time, but it certainly could be.

Curiously, last night I went to, there’s a history society that I attend locally and we had a magic lantern show. And I don’t know if you’ve come across a magic lantern show, but a magic lantern show is, it’s a wooden box with a whole bunch of candles in it. They put painted glass slides in, and some of the painted glass slides, if they manipulate them in a certain way, they can simulate movement, or arms moving around or.

[00:26:41] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, they’re really cool.

[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I really was hit by a sense of, that was entertainment. And there was such pleasure and innovation in that. And it’s the same now, right? Along comes the internet and we get the same pleasure out of that. And along comes AI and the next generation will get the same amount of pleasure out of that. But it was also curious to see, and I’m just going to use the word slow, how slow that activity was.

There was a lot of breathing room. There was a lot of space for you to inject your own thoughts. There was a lot of time waiting for the chap to pull out one slide and put the other one in. Whole minutes would go by and nothing would happen. But there was no expectation that, well, we just lost a couple of minutes there.

So I think that’s kind of leading me onto an unexpected consequence of the internet is maybe that we’ve lost the capacity to think in that kind of slow manner, which I really hadn’t parsed it until last night when I saw what entertainment was 150 years ago. And it was so gentle and slow and enormously pleasurable. Once you’d suspended that there’s no CGI, there’s no Tom Cruise there, it’s just a person on a glass slide. But it was absolutely fascinating. It gave me a real window into the pace of life and what that might have been and how that has changed. And it will, I presume, never, that genie will never go back in the box.

[00:28:05] Marc Benzakein: Well, no. I mean it’s impossible for any of that. I mean I can bring it to modern day terms. When you watch or listen to a podcast, do you listen to it at regular speed or do you listen to it at 1.5 or 2?

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, most people I think.

[00:28:18] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. If I have a day where I am doing nothing, I even watch my movies now, I watch them at 1.5x or 2x. And it’s crazy because your brain adapts to it very quickly. But then what happens is, if I’ve gone through a whole day of like listening to podcasts or something like that, which I’ll have going on in the background and I have no interaction with people, when I’m done listening to them, it is dreadfully dreadful. I become impatient talking to people because they talk so slowly.

And then I wonder, am I speaking faster than I normally do now because I’ve been listening to this podcast. And I have to reset my brain. And the thing is, I kind of feel like, I have this theory on ADHD, which I definitely have. My theory on ADHD is, there’s this misconception that ADHD is something where you can’t keep your attention on any one thing, which we’re finding out that’s not true. You either hyperfocus or you’re not focused, in simple terms.

And I feel like what it boils down to is a ADHDers have to have 100% of their bandwidth taken up all the time. That’s what it boils down to. So if what I’m working on requires a hundred percent of my bandwidth, I can hyper focus on it and do nothing else. If I don’t then, I’ve got four screens on my computer. I used to have six, but I’ve got four. I’ve pared it down to four and I’ve got something going on on all those screens. If I’m doing something that’s kind of mundane and just, because I have to have that filled all the time.

But I think that as a society, you talked about time, and it’s really kind of a rule of economics, right? You spend what you make. No matter what you’re making, you’re going to spend it all. That’s kind of like this echo. And it’s the same with time. Unless we actually discipline ourselves to say, look, mental health is just as important, so that means downtime, meditation, all these things are just as important no matter what society tells us. Those things are just as productive as putting out a widget or whatever you’re doing.

And so I think that what has to happen at a societal level, in order for us to gain back some of this discipline, is we need to recognise that while, yes, we need to take up a hundred percent of our time, what are the important things that we need to do in order to take up that a hundred percent of the time? And the reality is, some of that is downtime. Some of that is sleep, some of that is eating, some of that is interacting with people or whatever it may be. And I think technology, because it is constantly the shining new object, takes us away from all of that.

[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think for me, the profundity of the internet, let’s just use that term, you know, whatever is bound up inside that term, is enormous. You know, it’s probably the most, up till now, maybe AI will come to surpass that, but up until this point, I think the internet is probably the most profound technological invention of all time.

[00:31:04] Marc Benzakein: I call it the eighth wonder of the world.

[00:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, right. So the capacity for all that it brings. The fact that you can communicate with people, as I am with you. You are literally on the other side of the planet, and I’m talking to you as if you are stood next to me. The mind boggles. But also access to news, access to publishing your own information, seeking out communities that are just like you and the myriad way, oh, commerce. Let’s not forget that. That whole thing. The capacity for that, remarkable. All of it, remarkable and amazing.

But I think fair to say that there’s always swings and roundabouts. All of those wonderful things that we’ve just described, there’s probably some missteps along the way. And that was one of the things that I wanted to ask you. Are there any bits during the internet’s evolution to where we are now, where you think, do you know what, maybe we shouldn’t have done that? Maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Have you got any sort of thoughts on that, where you look back and you think the internet probably could have avoided that aspect?

[00:31:58] Marc Benzakein: I could think of a lot of little things. I think it’s one of those million little things, right? So going back to those days, it was really quite interesting. You know, I didn’t know what DNS was. I didn’t know, I barely knew what an ethernet cable was. We had this box sitting there that was a Cisco router. I had no idea what a router was. I mean, all this stuff because it was all pre-configured.

And I think the thing that blew me away back then, and this doesn’t really answer your question, but the thing that blew me away was, here we had people that we would get on phone calls with each other to work through problems, because this guy understood DNS, this guy understood routing. The two didn’t both understand both. It was really insane that it worked at all.

And I remembered sitting there going, this is a worldwide thing and it’s going to become a worldwide phenomenon. I mean it’s already working on a worldwide level. And it’s a bunch of people who don’t know each other, who probably if they were in the same room as each other, wouldn’t like each other.

I mean there were guys that I dealt with, there was this one guy, Frank, every time there was a DNS problem, I had to call him. I would dread calling him because his first question would be, what did you do now? It wouldn’t be like, ironically, it would be like, accusatorily, right? If that’s a word. I hated calling this guy, right? But somehow or another, we knew that we were working on something bigger than all of us, and so we tolerated each other at these various levels.

[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just inject a couple of my things? Yeah. Is that all right?

[00:33:25] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Absolutely.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Because where I was going with this was, at the outset of the internet, I think there was a widespread assumption, and hope, that open things would win. And for a period of time, I think they did. So an example would be, I don’t know, things like RSS and things like that. Just widespread, open standards, everybody understood. And I think a lot of that has been upended, you know, the social networks came along, and made these utterly beguiling interfaces, which consumed lots of time. I’ll get onto that as my second point in a moment.

But the standards sort of got, not thrown out the window because they’re still there and, you know, you can still build on top of them, but they got usurped. More utilitarian things that were more easily understood because you were in this silo worked. And so closed things started to dominate.

I have this notion, I have this hope that we are maybe seeing a little bit of a pushback against that. Obviously you and I are in the WordPress space where those kind of things are incredibly important. So that would be one of my things.

And the other thing, which I think I can say for me, and I think it maps across many people, but I can’t be certain about that, is the time that can be consumed on the internet, which with the benefit of hindsight could have been better spent doing other things. I think it’s easy to become, not addicted, but for me to really get lost in the internet.

[00:34:51] Marc Benzakein: What you’re talking about is a natural evolution though, because there’s no real way to regulate that. That’s like, you can’t. How do you regulate that? And I mean that was of course the appeal of all of it back then. Just like blockchain, that’s the appeal of blockchain is like, how do you regulate it? We knew that eventually people would figure out how to regulate it, even then. Because I remember us having these congressional hearings and things about monopolies and things like that, and all these things that had to do with the internet.

And it was very clear that the people asking questions had no clue what they were asking, because they had no clue what the internet really was other than they used email. They had no clue how far reaching. And so they would try to put standards in that just didn’t make sense. But we all knew that eventually people would be in those positions that actually grew up with the internet, understood it. And, of course, you can be cynical or whatever, the government is going to figure out a way to regulate everything so they can get their piece of the pie somehow.

And we saw a little bit of that with the regulation of, say, for instance, IP addresses, which back then were a lot harder to come by because there was a big concern about IP address shortages because we were on IP v4 and there was no such thing as what they call network address translation. So like every single website, if you had a web server, every website had its own IP address. If you were at home, you had a static IP address that was assigned to you.

And I remember filling out the forms, which was like a 20 page application, it may not have been 20, but it sure felt like it, application for more IP addresses, more blocks of IP addresses because after, so we had ISDN, which was kind of a big flop, and then we went to the modem standard which was dial up, which was actually, became very highly profitable for us. But then we got into DSL, which was the digital subscriber line concept. And it was cable or DSL. Those were the two high speed or broadband options.

And even when DSL just came out, we had to assign people IP addresses. So it’d be like, here’s your DSL modem. We would go out, we would install it in their home. Here’s your IP address. And with your DSL subscription comes a dial up subscription, so that when you’re traveling, you can access the internet and you can dial in from your hotel room or whatever.

And I’d say that the only thing we could have changed maybe was the messaging. Because everything else, and it’s still a matter of, look, the internet represents freedom. It represents the freedom to do what you want, when you want, how you want. And hopefully you’re not doing anything illegal. But of course there was a lot of that going on as well. But I don’t, the whole point of the wild westiness of it is that it was the wild west and you could do whatever you wanted. And people loved that freedom.

And so I don’t know, you know, my big frustration is I’d have people call me at two in the morning on my home phone line, because their internet was down and they were going to go on a raid on World of Warcraft or something like that, and they were the raid leader and, by the way, true story. I’m not making this up. And somehow this guy got my phone number and death threat. I mean, I got a death threat because he couldn’t go on this raid.

I mean the stories during that time are crazy. And I think it really is just a matter of, I think as always, with everything, messaging is everything, but people are still going to do what they’re going to do, whether it’s legal or not. So I’m not sure that there were any mistakes that were made because it was an evolution. It wasn’t, there was nothing intentional.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: I mean, it’s a technology which is just flooded with all of humanity. So the idea that it was going to be unicorns and rainbows all the way down was misguided because it was just waiting for humans to come in with all their interesting, fun, curious, illegal, time wasting stuff, and pour all of that into the internet. I am so fascinated about where all of that will go.

The bit that makes me most interested is that I had quite a significant portion of my life when the internet didn’t exist. And so I had a childhood which was completely inoculated from the internet. And so I have that perspective and so, okay, here’s the bit where I sound like the curmudgeonly old man and, you know, the youths of today and all of that. And that’s not really the intention.

But my children’s generation have never had that. And it’ll be curious to see how they grow up in a world in which always on was always a thing. From very early age, they had access to technology. The endeavor to acquire information is now more or less trivial. You just log onto something and all of that is available to you. We’ve got AI coming at a breathtaking pace. It would just be so interesting to see how this goes. And also very interesting to see how my generation cope with its onset because, sure as anything, it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down. And so we are going to have to try and keep up, and hopefully we will, without becoming too curmudgeonly.

[00:39:52] Marc Benzakein: My son is going to be 21 this next year, and he hates everything that has to do with technology, which is really fascinating. He’s in college and outside of college, he works at a Barnes and Noble. He has his girlfriend and they go hiking every single day. He takes a hammock with him and puts it between two trees and lays in his hammock and reads books. And this is not something that I trained him to do.

This was, I mean I appreciate that about him other than he’s, you know, not nearby so the only way I can contact him is texting and phone calls, but he prefers phone calls to texting. He prefers email to texting because emails, you check your email when you want to, you don’t get interrupted by the text message notification. And he’s very, very bright and his whole circle of friends are very, very bright and they’re not into technology either.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: I was just going to say, I’ve noticed that that seemingly would be a bit of a trend over this side of the pond as well. There does seem to be a groundswell of turning things off or minimalising, tech minimalism, let’s call it that. So things like vinyl is coming back as a format for consuming music. The phone’s getting simplified so that there’s less on there. Apps being deleted because the assumption that it’s good to have more things coming in and that more connection is a good thing has been sort of pushed to the back.

Actually many of my children’s generations seem to have now grown weary of that, and they realise that actually that’s not in their best interest to be engaged all the time, every day. And so that will be a curious pushback. It almost seems like a sort of Hollywood plot that, doesn’t it?

[00:41:24] Marc Benzakein: Maybe it’s just that it’s so taken for granted now just like a car is or anything else, that they don’t think of it as anything other than what it is.

[00:41:36] Nathan Wrigley: So we were sort of caught up, our generation were caught up with this constant cycle of innovation, newness, the shiny thing. And actually for a whole sort of 20 years, there was no let up in that, was there? The internet came along, home computers came along. They got smaller. They became laptops, which you could then take everywhere. Internet and mobile phone networks got switched on. Then the advent of a computer, which you could hold in your hand came along. Social networks came along. All of that completely switched on, connectivity came along. There was a constant churn of evolution and next new thing. Maybe you’re right.

[00:42:09] Marc Benzakein: It’s like you’re talking about the television set. In our house growing up, the TV set was something that was kind of always on, and so when we turned it off, it wasn’t a big deal or we didn’t feel the need to watch it constantly. We didn’t need to, I mean let’s say that you live in a place where, out your front window, you have like this beautiful view. But every single day you see that same exact view, to the point where you can acknowledge that it’s a beautiful view, but you’re not as likely to acknowledge it every single day.

I think that that’s the way that technology has become. And of course, I welcome that because I want our kids to have some of the same experiences that we Gen Xers had, you know, where we had to drink water out of the garden hose because our parents told us to go out the door and not come back until after dark. And I don’t want to go that extreme but the point is that they have these things at their disposal, and they just know that they’re there, so they don’t feel like they have to constantly pursue it.

And I mean, I remember last year when my son was out visiting, I took him to this place called, it’s called the Medicine Buddha, which is about, it’s out by Santa Cruz. And it’s about, I don’t know how many acres it is, but it’s redwoods. It’s nothing but redwoods. And we were out there for about two hours hiking. He’s like, Dad, why didn’t you bring me here two days ago? We could have spent the whole weekend here. I mean, it was like, to give you an idea of what it’s like, it is so quiet there because the trees are so tall that the birds don’t even come down,

So I think that the pendulum is swinging in the right direction. I do think that youth today has a lot of the right ideas. You know, hopefully our generations haven’t screwed it up too much for them, that they get to appreciate all of that. But I’m not as worried about it.

But I will also say that with our kids, we were not super restrictive with the screen time with our kids. And it was always funny, you know, we kind of started it out as an experiment and what we found was that they’d play on their tablets, or on their computers for an hour or whatever, and then they’d be like, let’s go play basketball, or let’s go play football, or whatever.

And they would just put the things down and they’d go out and explore on their own. And my kids, it’s crazy how sometimes hard it is to get a hold of them because, oh, I left my phone at home, sorry Dad. And so I see it going in a good direction. But that’s the funny thing is like we went from this period, and I know this was supposed to be about the whole evolution of the internet and we kind of, as you and I do, went down.

[00:44:36] Nathan Wrigley: We segued.

[00:44:37] Marc Benzakein: We segued. But there was a time as crazy as it is, that when you wanted to get on the internet, it had to be intentional. You had to deliberately want to get on the internet. So if you went traveling and you had dial up access, you would have to hook up your laptop computer to a modem, unplug the phone line from the hotel phone line, plug it into your computer, and then hope that the dialing worked, right? That you could get an outside line and that it would take you to the internet and that you’d be able to have a connection. And then it would, nine times out of ten, it would be a long distance number that you had to call because you were in a hotel somewhere else. And now if we go into a hotel that doesn’t have WiFi, we freak out.

[00:45:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s like, what’s going on? This isn’t normal.

[00:45:25] Marc Benzakein: Welcome to the 20th century, I mean.

[00:45:27] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like we’ve grown up in such an interesting time. If you look back and if, like me, you’re into things like archaeology. Archaeology really does show that for most of humanity, especially if you go pre-history, thousands of years go by and the innovation is very small. You know, there might be one or two little things which built up this growing corpus of things which humanity use.

But it might be that somebody invents a slightly new way of cutting the wheat down, or it might be a new way of building a wall or what have you. And that’s the pattern of history. Slow, fairly slow, pedestrian until you get to much more recent times, couple of hundred years ago, and things start to pick up speed. And now we’re at a point where, goodness knows what is going to happen even in the next six months, especially in the realm of AI. We really are at a rate of change, which is very difficult to keep track of.

But it’s exciting. It’s a time when everything is up for grabs. It really is exciting. And hopefully we are going to maintain that enthusiasm, maintain that interest. Make sure that, you know, we’re all safe and well fed and everybody’s looked after. Let’s hope those kind of things happen. But what a breathtaking time to live in. What an interesting time we are in.

[00:46:43] Marc Benzakein: Well, I mean the idea of the internet, and I remember saying this when we started our internet service provider. I said, look, we have an opportunity to level the playing field for businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re small or if you’re big. On the web, it all looks the same. And I think that that’s always been kind of one of the drivers for a lot of us, especially in the open source world, is this idea of leveling the playing field between kind of the haves and the have nots, right?

So we have the same access to knowledge that people with means might have. We have the same access to products. We have all the same accesses. So in many ways, from a consumption level, I’m talking about consuming knowledge as well as products, but from a consumption level, we have a level playing field. From the other side of things, it’s not as level as it used to be.

A Walmart or an Amazon obviously is going to show up in every search for everything, as opposed to back in the day, all you really had to do was just put in a few keywords and somehow or another you’d show up on Yahoo or AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or whatever it was at the time, you know, before Google came along. And then Google came along and the same thing was still true for a while, where you could like do just minimal amounts of SEO and get attention to your website and get business.

So the idea and I think the mission of the internet kind of should always be to keep the playing field level. I just don’t know that that’s necessarily possible because obviously the people who have the power and the money are going to be able to tilt things in their direction. But having said that, it is still the greatest opportunity for us to level the playing field of anything out there.

[00:48:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s such a good way, I think we should probably end it on that, because that’s such a nice and optimistic note actually, in many ways.

We began this conversation not really knowing where we were going to end up, and that has proved to be the case. We really did go in all sorts of different directions there, but absolutely fascinating.

You know, we revealed a lot about our own past and our sort of heuristics and intuitions about how it’s going to be for our children’s generation, and what we’ve enjoyed and what we think might be of concern in the future. That was absolutely fascinating. Marc Benzakein, where can we find you online, 24/7?

[00:49:05] Marc Benzakein: You can find me online, not 24/7, I actually do try to take some time off of technology. But I am with MainWP. I do their marketing and partnerships, for MainWP, which is a fantastic WordPress management dashboard. That’s my plug. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter, Marc Benzakein. I’m pretty sure I’m the only Marc Benzakein out there. I’m marcbenzak Twitter and Bluesky and those things. And then you can find me on Facebook and I’m just kind of generally all over the place.

[00:49:38] Nathan Wrigley: I will endeavor to find those links and I’ll drop them into the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com and search for, well, I suspect if you just search for Marc’s first name, which is Marc with a C, M-A-R-C. If you search for that, you’ll probably come up in the search. But Benzakein, B-E-N-Z, as we say in the UK, A-K-E-I-N. Marc Benzakein, thank you so much for a really interesting chat today. I appreciate that.

[00:50:03] Marc Benzakein: Thanks for having me, Nathan. Appreciate it.

On the podcast today we have Marc Benzakein.

Marc’s story is one that spans nearly the entire history of the Internet. With roots reaching back to the mid-90s. He explores how curiosity and an enthusiastic embrace of technology led him from running a small coffee importing business, accepting payments by snail mail, fax, then email, to helping wire up schools for Internet access when modems worked incredibly slowly, and only a handful of people were online.

This episode is a departure from our usual topics about plugins, themes, and WordPress community news. Instead, we’re more in the business of reminiscing this week. Taking a reflective walk down memory lane to look at how the Internet has evolved, not just as a technology, but as an integral part of society that’s transformed how we work, communicate, and think.

Marc shares some personal stories, building bulletin board systems, forging long-distance friendships over phone lines and slow modems, and watching as Internet access shifted from an intentional, difficult-to-navigate hobby for the few, to an invisible, always-on utility that we all take for granted.

We talk about how technology has affected not only business and productivity (often creating more work instead of less), but also our attention spans, expectations around entertainment, the pace of life, and even the social fabric that binds us together. We discuss the cultural shifts that came with always-connected living, digital minimalism, and the recent push by younger generations to step back from tech and reclaim a bit of analog life.

We chat about the early optimism of open standards, the rise of walled gardens and social networks, and the challenges of regulation, commercialisation, and the balancing act between freedom and responsibility online.

Marc’s perspective is shaped by decades of direct technical experience, as well as thoughtful observations of how technology is reshaping the world around us, sometimes for the better, sometimes in ways we need to pause and question.

Whether you’re nostalgic for the old days of dial-up, intrigued by how the Internet’s culture has shifted, or curious about how these transformations might play out as new technologies like AI reshape society, this episode is for you.

Useful links

MainWP

AOL

Prodigy

Gopher

ServerPress Is Shutting Down

LANtastic

Novell

BBS (Bulletin board system)

WWIV

Ham radio

Marc on X

Marc on LinkedIn

Marc on Bluesky