The web of 2001 was a web of sites … Now it’s a web of platforms.

This is all true and I agree, but a big piece of the story that’s missing is access. People online were mostly demographically adjacent. The walled gardens sprang up for the same reasons you see more walls in places with high economic disparity.

The “utopian” attitude described in the article was a natural response to lack of representation. Society wasn’t actually as far along as millennials thought.

That utopian vision is achievable. There’s just more work to be done than we thought.