[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.