You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.
But for me, the world started with my youth. I was a young kid back then...
Seriously, it was probably Usenet that kept me engaged. The web was exciting to browse but the conversation was on Usenet.
See Catholics and Protestant See Muslim and Jews
No form of communication would have stopped the racism, inabilities to see other cultures and work together
People suck. Connecting them doesn’t result in utopia
There are some points in the book that after reading became extremely obvious, like the belief that technology can (and will) overcome human limitations, restoring us to a perfect/divine state; that technological progress is the path to transcend physical and moral limits (all of which we see in the techno-optimism of the tech industry).
It's been around forever, we are just seeing a new dress up of it with the information age, the way tech "leaders" speak has been mocked to no end in Silicon Valley because of how insufferably close to religion all of this is...