It's quite striking to read what people were saying about the internet in the early 90s.

Esther Dyson: "The fundamental thing (the Net does) is to overcome the advantages of economies of scale…so the big guys don't rule."

Kevin Kelly: "computers…are not the beginning of authority but its end"

books.google.de/books?id=vvSVt…

(This passage has a real "hold my beer" quality which I love)

Fred Turner's "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" talks about how this group was very steeped in the ideas from cybernetics, scenario planning, etc.

Makes it even more surprising to me that they couldn't imagine how the internet would fail to live up to those early promises.