I think Snowden's disclosures were a loss of innocence for many technologists, and this reflects that. I can't imagine this would have been written in his absence.
Another large part of the article is corporate control of the internet and that was a problem long before Snowden. That corporations would control the world and use the internet to create a Shadowrun type world was again something people had been warning about as less of the content on the internet was what people put up and more what was curated for you.
The end of the internet as a place for free expression is being driven in large part by the type of people that frequent this site. They're here to make money, a lot of it. And they're going to do what they can to lock you into their way of presenting things to make it very difficult for you to use another basically identical service. They're going to lock you in with your own data, sell it back to you and package you up to sell to others. The death of the internet began long before Edward Snowden showed the world what the other monster on the wires was doing.
Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)* switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards.
* One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.
The masses are pretty important in discussions about what kind of society we ultimately want.
This might be true, while it being true that the masses are largely irrelevant at implementing the societies that we have and live under… hence why organizations with the resources and power, can tend to drive what the masses can see and withhold things from a public that is all too willing to accept things at face value.