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I view this sense of wonder as part of a techno-glamor where people unquestioningly invested their life energy into automating and digitizing everything. This glamor is reflected in optimistic slogans like "Information wants to be free" and "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This optimism is less credible now that the "powers that be" take "cyberspace" more seriously.
Your idea that if you just simply type the correct characters into the address bar, you'll discover the coolest thing ever is one of the historic visions for the Internet:
"Berners-Lee named his first hypertext system Enquire, after an old book, he found as a child in his parent's house called Enquire Within upon Everything which provided a range of household tips and advice. The book fascinated young Tim with the suggestion that it magically contained the answer to any problem in the world. With the building of the Enquire system in 1980, and then the Web ten years later, Berners-Lee has pretty much successfully dedicated his life to making that childhood book real."
I see this vision implemented in sites like Archive.org and Wikipedia.org.
Well, those slogans are no longer true. Initially, effort was put into making things more free, and this resulted in the massive flowering of the internet we saw in the 2000s, however, by the early 2010s, corporate interests saw the "benefits" of locking things down more and more. Of course, the culture of the internet meant this had to be done gradually (boiled frogs and all that) but this effort, through the 2010s, gave us the brightly-lit Walmart that is the internet today. Internet culture has also been replaced (conveniently, for the powers that be) with more unbelievably stupid culture-war nonsense.
I see this vision implemented in sites like archive.org and Wikipedia
The Internet Archive is closer to this than Wikipedia. Wikipedia used to be great, but it's been used more and more to push the corporate-backed Facebook-approved version of reality over the years.