Before Spotify, before YouTube and even before BitTorrent took over, I spent time in an mIRC community called The Borg Collective. It was one of those underground IRC chat rooms where people gathered to chat, queue for downloads and share huge collections of MP3 files. If you wanted a rare album in 2000, there was a good chance someone in the channel had it. The atmosphere felt more like a community than a download site, with regulars who knew each other by nickname and bots quietly serving files around the clock. Looking back, it was a snapshot of a brief period when IRC was one of the internet’s biggest file-sharing platforms.