Producing pure human expression full time requires either an income stream or a pile of money to burn through. As the internet has opened up to more people, the reality of keeping it running has required the crass commercialism that is so at contrast with the early, aristocratic web.
I agree the current state of the web of fuedal and sub optimal, but the comparatively tiny boy's club of the early web wasn't terribly democratic, either.
"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)
"In an important democratic innovation, pay for attending the Ekklesia was instituted in about 400 B.C., thereby ensuring that everyone, including citizens of the working classes, could afford to participate in the political life of the city. Bronze or lead tokens were issued to those attending the meeting, and these could later be redeemed for the assemblyman's pay of two obols (one-third of a drachma) per session."
The citizens assembly met every 10 days, so there were many opportunities for citizen participation.
Because of the known security problems with digital voting systems, the system was supposed to work only as a tool to form opinions. Initiatives were then put to final vote in real-life assemblies, where everyone was allowed to participate. We didn't have any "classical" delegates.
Both of these steps posed their challenges in participation:
- Liquid Feedback was not the easies tool to understand and use. For non-technical people, it was quite the challenge. And of course, a computer in the first place.
- Full member real-life assemblies, particularly on a national level, require time and money for travel, accommodation etc. Because we didn't have "real" delegates, if you couldn't afford to go, you were out.
There were some suggestions to overcome these issues (like a "permanent assembly" which would work by postal -snail mail- vote), but that never came to pass. (Or at least I think it didn't, I moved out of the country since then and don't follow that closely anymore.)
Manipulative ad-spam typo-squatter sites basically took over the Web. Around '08 or '09 Google seemingly surrendered in the battle against them and took to just showing the same handful of trustworthy sites for most searches. Smaller communities and sites faded. Meanwhile, a huge percentage of "legitimate" sites have become nearly indistinguishable from ad-spam sites. The spammers won, in a way, by becoming the Web.
Youtube, briefly a kind of miracle of the information age, is so full of people trying to sell things or make a living at it that they've drowned out the earnest amateurs. Plus there's tons of advertising on it now. Just another bazaar full of haggling and people trying to pick your pocket, where once there was something like a community theater.
Broadcasting one's identity is valuable ($$$) but leads to the ongoing conflict between those embracing that and those viciously trolling them under what remains of traditional Internet anonymity. Now that there's money behind it, the old-school Internet reaction of "well yeah, why the hell did you put your real name and address on the Internet?" is being seriously challenged, even in tech circles, by "real names for all so we can hunt the trolls (oh, also anyone else we don't like, but surely that will never be a problem)!" The money in tying Web identities to real identities may well win, over the value of (even semi-)anonymous speech.
I don't see it as frontier versus civilization: I see it as pure human (and human-scale) expression versus (incomprehensibly massive and alienating) commercial exploitation. Commercial exploitation is winning.