Really? The internet looks old. A teenager in the 90s, aged fast in the 2000s, got a family in 2010s and now is seeking to police everyone through its retirement.

In terms of information history, we're still in the newborn stage. We don't even have a single generation that has been born and died with access to instant worldwide communication - that will happen when I and my cohort die. I was one of the first kids to be able to independently access information without my local community adults gatekeeping it. It's one of those little things that becomes a big thing in hindsight, like being able to read the Bible in the vernacular. Gen Z (and maaaybe some Millennials like myself but that's questionable) are the first generation to grow up with geographically-independent hobbies and subcultures. Even the old stodgy or corporatized Internet has this property.

It is starting to even have a shape. People just stopped giving up on service formats (how are you supposed to read instant messages again?) all the time because they like some other one better.

Society has mostly just discovered it exists.

The medium hasn't changed. We're still on "Version 1".

We see versions but maybe there's a lifecycle to every medium. I m sure when TV was invented people made blue-sky predictions about how it would change the world for the better and not become the means that rich people use to rule over democratic audiences. The internet we know was the medium of one-to-all communication but it seems we -very soon- stumbled on the limits of such communication with all the censorship & tracking . Maybe the next medium will use some other mode, where one-to-all does not matter anymore

And while the internet changed societies, it did not "change societies", as in the western world democracies function pretty much as they did in the 80s, but with digital tools instead of analog. We did not see huge changes like when printing was invented: The world map is still the same