I think it's deeper than misaligned expectations. Consider this line:

> Google has gotten exceedingly good at organizing everyday life. It reliably gets me news, recipes...

What I mainly hear on this site and elsewhere is people complaining about how the news is partisan rubbish, fake, and serves the "elites". And recipes. Seriously? I had a half dozen people berate me earlier for suggesting that cooking your own meals should be an enjoyable part of life.

Nobody wants news and recipes.

Here's the problem.. "The Internet" was military project that got loose. "The Web" was a solution for research scientists to exchange papers. That's all. Driven by a massively profitable industry, a solution looking for a problem expanded in expectations, and took over the consciousness of generations of an entire society.

"Organising everyday life" is an inadequate appraisal. Most businesses had to be dragged screaming and kicking online. We still possess a vague, poorly thought-through ideal that somehow a connected, "technological" society is a better one, and a thirst for convenience and speed. But let's be honest, we don't really know what the net is for. It has no telos or guiding design principle other than what we overlay on it.

Military tools in the hands of "the people" tend towards insurgency and revolution. Wasn't The Internet's "killer app" the Arab Spring? The brightest moment of the Web was in it's formative years, as an explosion of ordinary speech and new political power. Much since then has been an reaction to try dampening it, domesticating netizens, or even putting the genie back in the bottle.

Maybe a reason to be optimistic, excited even, is that we're still in the infancy of the network. It's still pregnant with unimaginable possibility.