Damn right it was. The "unreasonable elitists" itself was a narrative spun by a law firm that made one of the first of what would eventually be called spam mes

Damn right it was. The "unreasonable elitists" itself was a narrative spun by a law firm that made one of the first of what would eventually be called spam messages, in the form of BBS posts advertising their services to would-be immigrants to the United States looking to get into tech. They spammed their post to tons of BBS boards of varieties of topics, which often meant users of many of them were downloading that spam message many, many, many times, and because this was back when data was charged by the byte, they were paying for that privilege too. Naturally, they were pissed the hell off and crashed the law firm's servers with hatemail and harassment (rightfully so IMO.). In turn the firm took to the public talking about these weird nerds and their "internet" and how it was the future of commerce, whether they liked it or not, and businesses had the right to free speech same as anyone, and that included the right to advertise. IMHO, that's a canon event to when the Internet was destined to be ruined. As soon as the fucking salespeople got in, it was game over man.