I appreciate the effort to reform "nerds" into quirky elfin innocents but even USENET was full of creeps.
Maybe it was destined to develop the way it did, given the permissionless nature of the web, and that the ideal of an open and distributed web would be choked out at some point anyway, as a natural consequence of collective human behaviour.
And maybe, if the web could have had a few more years without the power hungry forces we now know, we would have developed a stronger immunity against such behaviour? We will never know, I guess.
Non the less, I'll forever hold a deep grudge towards the power hungry creeps for the catastrophic effects they unleashed on the world and for ruining the potential of a truly open, diverse and vibrant web. In a generation or two, I do think we will look back at the founders of Big Tech companies as creeps that harmed the world in unthinkable ways, just as we do with brutal powerful people in earlier history.
They shaped the world in countless ways, and the negatives are just now beginning to gain space in the collective consciousness.
The modern Internet is basically less like a city and more like a shopping mall now.
Then the creeps arrived, drunk on sudden power and the promise of quick cash, and started capturing and consolidating online activity into 'platforms', or walled gardens if you will. These where void of the creative expression of the free and open web and streamlined every interaction into a very narrow and neatly defined world.
These creeps started abusing their power early on to snoop on peoples activity, pictures and conversations — which would be viewed as totally unacceptable behavior in the offline world — and went on to build the worlds most sinister and cynical manipulation machine.
Creeps are antithetical to the spirit of the early internet and the open web and they are actively working agains the ethos of open protocols and playful creativity!