I agree. I remember hearing Clifford Stoll interviewed on the radio around 1995 and reading reviews of his book "Silicon Snake Oil," which was published the same year, and thinking that he was obviously wrong. It was just such a game-changer for me to be able to sit in my home in Tokyo, and, through a dial-up modem, get information I needed from throughout the world—information that otherwise would have required a trip to a major library or bookstore, if it was even available there. And to be able to find people interested in chatting about topics that no one else in Japan would have cared about. The Internet was clearly the future.

Cliff's viewpoint was definitely contrarian, but on the other hand many people thought that the internet would be a kind of utopia - either full of rational speech leading to better decision-making in the real world, or even a separate independent "nation" that governments could never control. Neither of those turned out to be fully true either.