> There's another dynamic here, though: pure human expression is an inherently aristocratic thing. The early internet was dominated by academia, teen-agers with lots of time to build their Geocities sites, and a handful of hobbyists doing it in the side.

"Aristocratic" strikes me as a strange way to describe at least two of those categories, and they hardly seem undemocratic (to take your comparison) to me. I mean, "on the side" and in the free time of students is where practically all democratic activity occurs! The exceptions would be full-time politicians and those making money from democratic processes (for the governmental sense of "democratic"), and those widely seen as exploiting the weaknesses of democracy to their advantage (think: wealth's influence on democracy) but I think it's fair to characterize those parts as (probably necessary) accidents of democratic society rather than the core expression of it.

What people do on the side is democracy, until the robots relieve us of our mostly-authoritarian day jobs (I'm not holding my breath on that one)