Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC).
Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules.
Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between.
Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit.
Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized.
True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily.
Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.