The article you linked to is from 2006; if a 30 year old technologist today is surprised by this, I don't think it's fair to say that they're either bad at understanding how technology affects society or liars because they weren't writing articles when they were 16.

More generally, people can grow, learn, and change a lot in a decade and a half, even if they were already adults at the beginning of the period. I don't think it's particularly effective to dismiss all current viewpoints of someone just because they happened to disagree with you on something 14 years ago.