#201 – Marc Benzakein on How Life Has Changed During the Internet Era
Transcript [00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. 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. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there. 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
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