If that's your mindset, the internet must be similarly disappointing to you. In either domain, you can select where you want to go and what you want to do.
In both cases, there was a time when both were exclusively people-powered and "the man" was entirely absent.
"There are some authentic nuggets if you know where to go" are the last kicks of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood, to use mixed metaphors. In the past anywhere/everywhere you could go was authentic.
IMO, the web was authentically p2p before online Paypal, banner ads and Bonzi Buddy. It's still possible to subscribe to blogs (said nuggets) via RSS - which is miraculously having a renaissance - but it's all going to be drowned out by the relentless, unfeeling firehouse of AI slop.
The goal DARPA was trying to accelerate by funding self-driving, btw, was to "achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2015, one third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned". [0]
[0] https://www.grandchallenge.org/grandchallenge/docs/Grand_Cha...
By way of explanation: rocketry was funded and developed for military ends, including von Braun's earlier work on the V2 and later work on missiles across the Atlantic and the development of ICBMs. IMO, there's no military presence in human spaceflight[1], but you may see it differently due to the heritage of the propulsion system.
When the internet became a public thing the counterculture quickly moved there.