My saying "It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity." does not mean I am overestimating how many people this online group represents in the real world. Even if I underestimated it, it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever.
"Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors."
Why then, was this not something realized by the "prophets" of the Internet 2.0? That's what the author is asking. What conclusion did I arrive at which came from error? Please kindly point that out to me.
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.
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My saying "It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity." does not mean I am overestimating how many people this online group represents in the real world. Even if I underestimated it, it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever.
"Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors."
Why then, was this not something realized by the "prophets" of the Internet 2.0? That's what the author is asking. What conclusion did I arrive at which came from error? Please kindly point that out to me.
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.