Comment by CalRobert
I miss when Californian ideology was of the “information wants to be free” and “connecting the people of the world will end tyranny” variety :-( .
Something really changed after the first dotcom bubble. Maybe it was my own youthful naïveté (as someone living in Sacramento desperately wishing I lived in that much cooler city to the west). Maybe it was the last drops of that wave Hunter S Thompson talked about breaking.
What happened: the ideology came into contact with the broader world of unscrupulous actors and human weakness.
We really do have access to all the world's information to a first degree. We also have access to all the world's propaganda, advertising, trolling, and algorithmic optimization of content.