The EasyEverything Edition

On internet cafes, offline lives, and early 2000s London.

Colin here. Back in the early 2000s, I remember regularly walking to a huge, orange-glowing internet cafe in central London. I'd deposit a few heavy pound coins, get a ticket, and sit down at a computer. It was a portal back home to friends in New York and California, with AOL Instant Messenger as the core connective tissue and rudimentary email interfaces (mine was Yahoo at the time). The student accommodations I was set up in didn't have internet wired in, so students who wanted to get their fill of the internet had the option of going to school, or to one of these cafes.