[Barrin92]

>It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk

I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.

I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.

[CalRobert]

Well, maybe it's because I'm Californian. I don't think I'd call myself an insider, I never worked at Google and I'm from Sacramento (which felt painfully un-cool back then!). And the Google I'm talking about would be staffed by Gen X'ers/Xennials at the time mostly - Someone who's 25 in 2001 was born in 1976.

I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.