I find it difficult to understand when you say "it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever". Even if I were extremely mollycoddled by my

I find it difficult to understand when you say "it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever". Even if I were extremely mollycoddled by my parents, I fail to grasp how I would not be exposed to such attitudes - however slight or fleeting - in my pampered upbringing. As for the prophets of Internet 2.0 (not sure why you're adding 2.0 here, we're discussing Brand and Kelly who were prophets of the intial web), I'd hazard a guess that their blindness came from a combination of good old-fashioned wishful thinking mixed with 'the shock of the new' that the web had in spades back then, galvanising them into becoming the 'egg-meet-face' cyber-utopianist proselytizers that the author of this article is deriding.