[hkt]

FWIW, I was one of the clique of 1337 hackers without being American or college educated!

In seriousness, the radicalism of the early internet was great for autodidacts, and I loved it. It shaped me as a person and I still don't have or need a university degree.

The thing that was nice in the past was that it seemed so easy to find other people finding their own path. It was a bit less commercial and a bit more communal. It was a great thing, but communities have a finite capacity for on boarding people. It is easy to squash that, and it was definitely squashed pretty hard as the internet popularised.

[encom]

Neither was I. I was a teenager in Denmark with internet access in the 90's. My family was poor, and I bought a modem with money I earned from my paper route. By most metrics, I was decidedly unprivileged.