As someone for whom the Declaration strongly resonated with, and still does, I think this is the crux of how things end(ed) up going sideways:

> Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms. (Winner)

This is a core American delusion that runs much deeper than merely the Web or the Internet. It's even been legally codified in things like Citizens United - a fallacy that large companies are merely groups of individuals. It's basically the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" dynamic applied to activities rather than money.

In reality, large companies are top-down authoritarian structures where most of the individual humans involved have their own individual will suppressed. Rather they are following direction from above, and any individualist choices they are allowed are within that context. If they go against the direction/orders too much, they will simply be replaced with a different more obedient cog (this is something so-called "right libertarianism" directly whitewashes by rejecting analysis of most forms of power dynamics aka coercion).

I do not think it is inconsistent to still believe in those individualist ideas applied to individuals, while also viewing Big Tech - with its many qualities of actually being government - as something whose at-scale "policies" should be subject to democratic accountability. But to do that, meaning to achieve reform without throwing out the whole idea of individual freedom in the online world, requires us to openly reject that corpo fallacy whereby individuals empathize with billion dollar corporations!

But of course from an American perspective this is all kind of moot for the next few years at least as the main support behind the current regime is exactly Big Tech looking to head off any sort of de jure regulation. And so we must not be tempted by their political calls that might claim to address these problems, as this regime's bread and butter is using very real frustrations as the impetus to implement fake solutions that perpetuate the problems while setting themselves up as lucrative speed bumps (eg look at the shakedown currently happening to mere wifi routers).

Which brings us back to why that individualist message is so powerful, despite how it ends up going sideways - because when traditional democratic accountability has been hopelessly neutralized, self-help is the only thing people have left.