This caught my eye:

We understood we were moving into a world where thinking would no longer be a personal activity but a collective one.

From my perspective, just shy of 30 years online, I would say that collective thinking was the dream, yes. The reality has become hyper-individualization of “thinking,” if we start with considering the information we take in to inform ourselves, to “think about.”

With targeting of content and building of filter bubbles, we explicitly individualize the information people get online. Our inherent confirmation bias is reinforced rather than reduced. Our “thinking” is more “personal” than it ever has been.

This is not new — before the web even existed, online bulletin boards and listservs were primarily just a new medium for people to use to congregate around the same stories, topics, beliefs, and biases they already congregated around. A new forum in which to have the same old arguments, but without the old limitations of physical location affecting who was present.

The dream of crossing old boundaries of dogma and prejudice, of new mutual understandings and enlightenments coming from this new means of communication, was also just that — a dream.

Your piece also reminded me of my experience decades ago, as the web was just coming into existence, watching online conversations expressing concerns about commercialization of the internet get steam-rollered and made irrelevant by…the commercialization of the internet.