Everything is Free...

You want to learn about the beginning of the internet, you should watch We Live In Public. 
You're right, I was not asking you, I was telling you, because this documentary explains everything.
Made in 2009 and directed by Ondi Timoner, We Live In Public follows internet pioneer Josh Harris, who in 1999 started a break-through social experiment in a New York City basement.

Before reality TV exploded, while online video streaming required extreme patience, and chat rooms were a thing, Harris created a prophesy of what the next 10 years of the growing internet would bring us. The film opens with a coldly casual video message from Harris to his dying mother (very similar to a scene on Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job). He says, "Speaking to you virtually is how I know how to do this best... This is what art is now."

Harris started Jupiter Communications in the early 1990s. It was a company that simply attempted to gather investors for the burgeoning internet, and find out what people would actually do with it. Stemming from this came Pseuedo, Harris's first online TV channel. It was completely interactive with live chat-rooms.  It was all about young hip kids sharing ideas, and they became millionaires because of it. And around 2000, most companies like these went bankrupt.

In 1999 Harris walked away from Pseudo, and began his art project / month-long party / utopian fascist commune / psychological experiment called Quite: We Live in Public. In an NYC basement at the turn of the century, with free food and drink, a communal shower, firing range, cameras in the bathrooms, bunk beds with cameras and TVs, and Stasi style interrogations, Quite was a physical embodiment of the internet and what Harris predicted it would become. Prophetically he said, "Everything is free except the video we take of you, that we own."

I was about 11 years old and in Rhode Island when most of this happened, so I was pretty clueless about social experiments in NYC basements (though there was an 11 year-old boy in there! Hope he turned out okay). I did watch MTV, and I did see an episode of Daria where her dad gets hired to a dotcom company that appropriately crashes and burns.  So when I saw this film I wasn't completely lost. It always excites me to discover subcultures and movements that happened while I was too young to be apart of them. It's like discovering something new about yourself.
The film ends with the befitting song, Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai, which was probably my favorite song at the time this film was based.

Allow me to quote,

Futures made of virtual insanity now

Always seem to, be govern'd by this love we have

For useless, twisting, our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound - for we all live underground