This is my biased take (I used to work for Facebook), but I tend to read some elitism and gatekeeping in arguments like the original article.
> “The internet wouldn’t have been created by people like Mark Zuckerberg, or any of the sort of corporate executives in Silicon Valley today,” he said. “They wouldn’t be capable, they don’t have the temperament, they’re too controlling. They don’t understand the whole idea of bottom up.”
I think the only people who want to use the internet in a decentralized, bottom-up way are engineers. The vast majority of people need a simple experience that doesn't require them to learn anything new or to make too many choices. That's not exactly the opposite of bottom-up, of course, and it's possible to have both sometimes. But optimizing for bottom-up vs optimizing for simplicity leads to very different outcomes. Sometimes when I hear engineers talk about how much they hate how popular websites like Facebook and Twitter work, it sounds like they don't care very much about whether their ideal internet would be useful for normal people.
I even think there's some of this going on in the privacy debate. Yes, normal people care about privacy a lot. But they mostly care about it when it impacts their life directly in ways they can understand, like traffic cameras or identity theft. It's hard for a normal person to engage in the debates about the Snowden leaks or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, because the details are technical, and the impact on most people's lives is indirect. Now, of course it's normal for people with a technical background to make decisions and judgment calls in their area of expertise, for the benefit of the public, without waiting for an informed public debate about all the little details. The world is complicated, and that's how everything works. But I think a lot of humility is called for in those situations, because you're mixing together questions of what people would value with questions of what they should value or of what you personally value. I worry about this when I hear engineers say things like "abolish Facebook". Like yes, many engineers would rather starve than give up their data privacy. But that really isn't how most people feel, and if you waved a magic wand and made everyone in the world an expert on cookies and IP addresses and databases, it's not at all clear to me that they'd feel the same hate for Facebook that many engineers do.