[aestetix]

It sounds to me like part of your growing up was realizing that the people you looked up to were human, and it shattered some illusions you had.

In truth, pretty much every social "scene" has a small core of dedicated people surrounded by a much larger social clique. This becomes more and more true as it grows in size. There will always be the "talkers" who are good at communicating but have "marginal skills," but I'd argue everyone has different strengths. For example, there are some absolutely excellent hackers who are terrible writers, and other people who write quite well about hacking, but cannot hack themselves. We need both types.

While quite a lot of the worry about government monitoring might actually be paranoia, I'll simply note that Snowden's relevations showed that a lot of the fears were justified. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in privacy that you are willing to make, which others refuse to make.