I was young in the 90s/2000s and it honestly felt like computing was a new stage for human progress.
I clearly wasn't the only one. There was the "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
I think the moral of all this is that fundamentally technology doesn't matter. If you don't have the public structures to reign in the oligarchs, shills and liars, you're not going to get anywhere.