The pace of technological development in the past 20 years has been driven by scaling processing, storage, bandwidth, and networks. The intellectual, legal, cultural, and social infrastructure to make that happen already existed for the most part. When tech has an impact deeper in the societal stack, it takes a lot longer for its impact to be felt.

NB: Eternal September was in 1993, when Usenet went mainstream. Facebook, Twitter, etc weren't invented for another decade. Since then, they've both toppled dictators and elected a reality TV star to the Presidency. Change happens gradually, then suddenly.