It's crazy that it seems like we're just going in loops every decade or so. New people enter tech, mostly focus on their own stuff, after a while, it becomes very clear how "deeply intertwined US companies and the US government are", and these people now lose their trust. Eventually, things been going well for some years, so new people enter the industry, with the same naive outlook, thinking "This couldn't be true of the government we have today" yet eventually, even they realize what's going on. Rinse and repeat every last 3 decades, and that's just what I remember, I'm sure others remember even further.

I am 50 yo and did live through multiple intertwinings. This time though, it is really the end of an era. Trust has been lost.

More positively, what's your opinion on this closer look post from Cloudflare?

The magic of the system is that the ratio of new entrants who don't aren't yet jaded enough to not be useful idiots vs the rate at which people become jaded vs the rate at which those jaded people leave makes it self sustaining.