00:00 The hosts discuss their experiences with the early internet, including dialing into bulletin boards and using AOL chat rooms, before introducing a story about the early internet in France.

02:48 France.com introduced the Minitel, a $200 computer distributed to every French household with a phone number, which initially allowed users to look up phone numbers and addresses, but after a teenager hacked it and added a messaging feature, chat rooms became the main reason people logged on, with sex chat rooms being the most popular.

05:38 Jean-Marc Manac worked as a Minitel animatrice, pretending to be a woman on multiple Minitel platforms and engaging in sex chat with people all night, incorporating his own unique worldview and cyber-feminist politics into the job.

08:33 Jean-Marc Manac, while working as a Minitel animatrice, found that people on the platform were surprisingly open and vulnerable, sharing their secrets and emotions with him, which made him realize that the internet is ultimately about human connection.

11:18 Jean-Marc Manac's time as a Minitel animatrice was short-lived, but the Minitel network itself lasted much longer and was seen as a rival to the internet in France, although it eventually shut down in 2012.

14:33 Leah Finnegan wrote an article trying to uncover the identity of an anonymous Twitter account called NYT Fridge, which started as a parody but has become a mean media critic.

17:13 The podcast discusses the humorous and somewhat serious nature of Gawker's attempts to uncover the true identities of unimportant anonymous Twitter accounts, with a specific focus on the NYT Fridge account.