[CalRobert]

I miss when Californian ideology was of the “information wants to be free” and “connecting the people of the world will end tyranny” variety :-( .

Something really changed after the first dotcom bubble. Maybe it was my own youthful naïveté (as someone living in Sacramento desperately wishing I lived in that much cooler city to the west). Maybe it was the last drops of that wave Hunter S Thompson talked about breaking.

[jordanb]

"Information wants to be free" was always a pretty marginal part of the California Ideology[0].

The main difference between now and thirty years ago, is that now they're only "anti-statist" when the state tries to control them personally. They're pro-state when it's being inflicted on their perceived enemies or underlings.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

[jimbokun]

What happened: the ideology came into contact with the broader world of unscrupulous actors and human weakness.

We really do have access to all the world's information to a first degree. We also have access to all the world's propaganda, advertising, trolling, and algorithmic optimization of content.