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I remember when MySpace came out. It did do something pretty incredible - which was unite people around the world with common interests and common tastes.

The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.

There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.

I've been fascinated by the Internet from the very start. In 2001, I had made a funny black-and-white film called 'How to Dance Properly,' a short video of me dancing to a Madonna song. I sent it to 17 of my friends on a Thursday, and by Monday, one million people a day were logging on to view it.

I would love to do something like 'Tosh.0,' where I host Internet clips. I did host 'Talk Soup,' which is similar. I love doing that, making fun of video clips on the Internet.

It was really fun. It was fun for a lot of reasons. It was fun because nobody thought that we would be successful. It was on a network that wasn't even there at the time.

For the music business, social networking is brilliant. Just when you think it's doom and gloom and you have to spend millions of pounds on marketing and this and that, you have this amazing thing now called fan power. The whole world is linked through a laptop. It's amazing. And it's free. I love it. It's absolutely brilliant.

All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it.

I think at first the Flume project really started out as an online thing. I used Facebook and SoundCloud, and I think we got lucky because it felt like a bit of a golden age of those social media platforms. So I managed to create quite a solid fan base online.

One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and - above all - creativity go a long way.