This article focuses on the few dozen people who had the most power, including my friend Menelaos, but the real story of CS (after the backups failed, "CS2") was the story of a community of millions of people building something wonderful together. That small nucleus of people who ultimately sold us out contributed, but they only contributed a tiny proportion of the whole.
I met a lot of people through Couchsurfing and HospitalityClub. It's boring to be in a new country and having your only social contacts be hotel employees who are being paid to be nice to you, and other tourists; all you can do is buy things, consume, and go out for dinner with other tourists. With CS2 and HC, by contrast, you could meet people and actually participate in stuff. Youth hostels are somewhat better than hotels on that axis, but CS2 was the bomb.
One of the great things about it was that, even if you didn't have a budget to travel, you could travel virtually by having people from random foreign countries come and stay at your house.
During the years I was participating in CS2, I was in a monogamous relationship, so I didn't have any opportunities to participate in the CasualSex aspect which other people in the comments are talking so much about; I saw it in action at CS2 parties a little, but most of what I know about it is hearsay.
Spies like Patrick Dugan were of course involved in CS2 even before the company was actually sold to them. I recall one ex-nuclear-sailor from the US who came to hang out with the couchsurfers here in Buenos Aires; he was supposedly working on an Argentine solar energy project.
Like a lot of communities, it was destroyed by granting a few people too much power. Being people (but lacking enough power to establish themselves as god-kings and found a dynasty) they used that power to privatize community resources and sell them off for their own benefit. It's a cautionary tale about checks and balances. Free-software licensing is an important control on abuses like this, but centralized hosting inevitably gives a lot of power to whoever has physical access to the data center.