You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.
True, but for me, the techno-optimism started with Google. I was a young kid back then, but the idea to catalog all of the world's information under a search engine (that worked) sounded wild to me at the time.
I was early to Match as well. When I first started, there were a total of 8 women in the entire Bay Area. I kept that free account for years and eventually found my (now ex-)wife through the site.
David F. Noble's "The Religion of Technology" is a quite good read to see how we arrived at this from monastic origins.
There are some points in the book that after reading became extremely obvious, like the belief that technology can (and will) overcome human limitations, restoring us to a perfect/divine state; that technological progress is the path to transcend physical and moral limits (all of which we see in the techno-optimism of the tech industry).
It's been around forever, we are just seeing a new dress up of it with the information age, the way tech "leaders" speak has been mocked to no end in Silicon Valley because of how insufferably close to religion all of this is...
