We did. I’m 35; a little older than you, and (maybe pertinent?) close in age to Mark Zuckerberg (though I’m neither wealthy nor successful). I have a lot of the same fond memories of the 90s internet that you do. The online walled-gardens that are now displacing the web, were in many cases founded by _our_ generation. The firestorms currently ravaging culture and politics? In many cases _we_ started them.
I feel I’m just verbalising the zeitgeist here, but we could’ve done better. We should’ve done better. There’s a solid argument that we weren’t to know, that nothing like the connection enabled by the internet has ever happened before, but as arguably the first “digital natives”, this happened on our watch.
If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?