The same anticipation of great things happening preceded the arrival of widely available internet, but all we really got was cat videos initially, and doomscrolling more recently. I don’t have much hope for great things anymore.

I saw a Microsoft talk decades back, that was a dispirited "the people of India could be buying educational materials and... but no, all the money is in ringtones". For some kinds of business perspective, ok I guess. But for others, and for civilizational change, what's going on in the tail can matter a lot. Does China become a US engineering/science peer in early 21st C absent an internet/WWW?

We got more than that. We got 24/7 surveillance.