None of this has anything to do with technology itself, though. All tools used by humans will be put to the purposes that those humans bear. The positive powe

None of this has anything to do with technology itself, though. All tools used by humans will be put to the purposes that those humans bear. The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity. After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean. A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project. Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.