Tales of the Internet

By Jessica Keyes

Before social media.
Before smartphones.
Before the algorithms.
There was the early Internet-chaotic, anonymous, exhilarating, and far more dangerous than anyone imagined.

Written in the late 1990s and first published in 2001, Tales of the Internet documents the raw, unfiltered world of the early Web at the exact moment it exploded into public life. Based on firsthand observations and real digital patterns of the time, this book reveals how ordinary people, opportunists, thrill-seekers, and predators behaved when suddenly given new identities, new freedoms, and a new kind of power.

Republished in 2019 and updated again in 2025, this edition reframes the original text for today's reader-offering reflections on how much has changed and, more importantly, how much has not. The scams are larger now, the platforms slicker, the risks automated, but the core human behaviors that shaped the early Web still drive the digital world we live in today.

Tales of the Internet serves as a time capsule of an online era that has vanished: a world of dial-up modems, message boards, primitive chatrooms, early e-commerce, and thousands of strange little websites where humanity revealed itself in new and unexpected ways. What began as an experiment in connection evolved into a mirror-reflecting our desires, our deceptions, our vulnerabilities, and our inventions.

Whether you lived through the early Internet or came of age long after it disappeared, this book offers a fascinating-and sometimes unsettling-look at the foundations of modern online culture. It shows how the Web didn't change who we are.

It simply exposed it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1696407729
• ISBN13: 9781696407724
• Release Date: September 2019
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"