When I was at uni (in the 80's) we used to laugh about echelon, and ridicule the idea that everything was being recorded and stored under Cheyenne mountain, only the tin foil hat people would treat it seriously - who knew.
Similarly I remember reading a comment on Slashdot in the late 90s warning how much of a dystopia the Web would become. I also remember myself mostly dismissing the comment as buzz-kill.
It's important to remember that those posts are only relevant now because of hindsight bias. If the web had moved in a different direction, we would be looking back on posts with different predictions with the same hindsight bias.
