Diamond Age was amazing when I read it in 2008. I couldn’t believe it had been written in ‘95, given its vision of (what we call) 3d printers, Amazon Turks, software mediated 1:1 relationships, etc. I imagine reading it today, it would read as a likely near-future-history, but in 95 it must have seemed laden with far-fetched original invention, both technological and societal.
I read it in the 90s. I think what people forget is in the pre-dot-com-crash era, there was a lot of (unwarranted, it turned out) optimism. If you took the rate of technology advancement and adoption through the 80s and early 90s and extrapolated it forward, and also took into account the social changes it had already driven (and which hadn't really shown their strongly negative sides), it was possible to imagine these really wild possible futures that seemed to be only a few decades off.
Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the wheels fell off that particular cart shortly after 9/11, along with a lot of optimistic visions of the future.
the most salient insight from the diamond age is in my opinion the isolated and fragmented nature of the internet and the extreme segregation into cultural communities, when at the same time everyone was talking about how the internet is going to connect everyone and erode all borders.
