I wasn't aware that Jaron Lanier was ever really for the Web. The things he's known for -- art games for the Commodore 64, early work on virtual reality, consulting on Second Life and Kinect, etc. -- are not really Web things. They're rooted more in the older William Gibson-style vision of completely immersive digital environments, rather than in hypertext.
Which makes it a bit unconvincing to call him "the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to." His ideology has always been orthogonal to the ideology the Web came out of.
From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2.
==Looks like his first "contra" essay was in 2000.
Internet2 is not "of the Web" either; it's focused more on developing out the IP network itself than on any particular application that runs over IP (of which the Web is one).
I'm not familiar with the work of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, but from the name it certainly sounds like it's more interested in the type of full-sensory environments Lanier has usually been associated with than with hypertext applications.
Which makes it a bit unconvincing to call him "the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to." His ideology has always been orthogonal to the ideology the Web came out of.