Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had minimal impact on politics until the 2000's. The entire comment just sounds like speculation about a time that is, in fact, fairly recent history. We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That only m…
I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it from my brother who got it from a BBS. I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine. I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure…
The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman, and The Turner Diaries, selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!
In 01999 many people in the US could read The Anarchist Cookbook entirely without leaving a government record simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that fact into a centralized database, and were famously reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9/11.
Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45 seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy information on how to do many terrible things, but there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center. (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to the library, Verizon probably stores that fact permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact.
We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI and the NSA.
In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than they were in the US.