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The corporations could not get their heads wrapped around the internet at first. They needed to deal with nerds and computer geeks to get anything done. These same people that they had kicked around and laughed at for being useless now had to be brought into boardrooms for product discussions. Then the dot com crashes happened and corporations learned that all of those people were not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. All of these gave the internet an extended era that felt a bit like the "Wild West". AOL internet was a commercial product that got mauled constantly because it hired average skilled programmers, the really ingenious programmers were the ones developing Instant Message based "punters" and program crashing email "bombs".

It ain't years it's months ago...

I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.

I'm not worried. We'll make a new one.

I was there, even a couple years before that... and in reality not so much has changed.

What we now call "The Internet" is what BTX (in germany) was back then: A commercialised platform controlled by corporations. Trolling, hate, ragebait... all nothing new, just look at archived posts from the Usenet!

The cool thing is that we now can rebuild something that is more akin to the BBS networks of yesteryear, something like the Fido-net, something that is entirely owned by the people using it.

The big tech industry products are like that. There are still small communities which are meaningful, peaceful and friendly.

Take a look at knockout.chat

Start using gopher today

Ah yes, the halceon days of non-stop pop-up ads and malware taskbars. /s

Not to mention that everything they mentioned was absolutely started to become what it is today. Nothing changed, they just progressed their plans over 20 years. Pretending it was all started with benevolent intentions is naive at best.