I remember reading this in my mid-teens and it really speaking to me.
Sometimes we tend to forget: nobody is forcing us to use the crap that "the Internet" has become home to.
The Internet isn't the content, it's the network - the map is not the territory and the underlying architecture hasn't changed all that much.
There will always be room to carve out your space and find your people.
That's definitely true. However, what changed is that you didn't really need that 20 years ago to achieve the same thing. It definitely needs more energy and time to get that. 20 years ago you had to go to bullshit sites, now the bullshit comes to you.
During and before StumbleUpon times, when I visited a random site, there was a good chance, that I could trust in the information on that, at least on some level. That's basically 0 for a while now.
Then I started to carve out that space on some selected social media. In the past 5 years, most of the smart people just simply left. Also those spaces (especially when those places became more popular) are slowly flooded with unusable information/misinformation/simple lies shared by others, even from people who I trusted.
Now, even that kind of "carving" is even more difficult, with keeping the possibility to get to know new people. For example, TikTok's, YouTube's, BlueSky's, and Twitter's algorithm are terrible. I tried to teach them with brand new accounts, but they became either very boring quickly, or couldn't filter out even very obvious misinformation.
My point it's just really moved to the periphery and is a subculture (and tied to crypto, which has a lot of shady things associated with it). The mainstream tech culture seems extremely nationalistic and terrified of the possibilities of a supranational unregulated unmoderated internet
In retrospect what is surprising is how long it took for such a disruptive new technology to register with existing power structures (at least explicitly).
Why are we trying to build a single unified platform for everything?
Maybe the friction of having different networks/applications based on the specific subculture/group you wish to associate with keeps them all a little less mainstream? Maybe this is a good thing?
I just wouldn't have guessed thing would have gone this way. I'd argue that the early Google was a bit of this nerd ethos going mainstream. And the degeneration was not top down from MBAs as one would predict, but seemingly from the bottom up from a new generation of programmers that don't seem to be in that supranational mindset
Being non mainstream also does present some issues. For instance I'm in China traveling at the moment. Github isn't blocked here but the connection is very flakey and some days it doesn't load at all. But effectively all OSS dev happens on github so I'm just out of luck. It'd be cool if there was some way to torrent repos for instance, but I don't think that's a service hooked up to github in any way
There's a middle ground where you get the worst of all worlds bc the current kinds lame/oring solution works for 90% of people most of the time
Anyway, it is what it is. You don't choose the jungle you live in
Cyberpunk was already a well established genre in 96, if you didn't see what the net was going to turn into you were already high on your own hopium.
...and then he wrote Mother American Night, which is way more radical and prescient than his declaration. If you are suggesting that John Perry's work tended toward statist notions of internet control later in life, you are mistaken.
John Perry has tons of fans who came up through his songs and have since connected those dots.
Chinese business crying foul over simply forcing an app to change owners is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.
Now days we have way more advanced self-media platforms, but each one is just an island of (both platform-imposed and self-imposed) isolation.