What you've left out of that idyll of the early internet, though, is that its population was
- smaller, by many orders of magnitude
- from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds
- mostly of comfortable material means
These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about.
The "heavy-handedness" of tech companies is IMO less a cause than it is a reaction to the inevitable degeneration of discourse as the Internet grew up.
The techno-libertarian-utopian ideals of the early internet were always a pipe dream because they failed to recognize the role of these factors in their culture, and attributed it all to the medium itself. Which is not to say that the Internet doesn't change our communication, just that it's not necessarily in the ways they wanted.
- smaller, by many orders of magnitude
- from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds
- mostly of comfortable material means
These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about.
The "heavy-handedness" of tech companies is IMO less a cause than it is a reaction to the inevitable degeneration of discourse as the Internet grew up.
The techno-libertarian-utopian ideals of the early internet were always a pipe dream because they failed to recognize the role of these factors in their culture, and attributed it all to the medium itself. Which is not to say that the Internet doesn't change our communication, just that it's not necessarily in the ways they wanted.