In 1995 when I first got onto the Internet I could immediately see the potential. A single network where anyone can publish their work and share it with the rest of the world. Where the world's knowledge would be at everyone's fingertips. Where everyone was free to express and debate their opinions. It was going to be a happy place.
Since I was a wide-eyed idealist teenager I imaged that the Internet would fundamentally change our society. Since information would be so easy to publish no one would bother to try to sell it anymore. The Internet would set all information free. There would be no need for to sell books anymore, unless you really like holding a book then it's just a small printing charge based on the number of pages. Anything you would want to know would just be a search away.
Now when I look around the Internet everything is dominated by commerce and greed. People only sharing their knowledge because it brings in revenue from ads. Putting their personal life on display for vanity and touting their personal (mis)knowledge for fame and selling t-shirts to finance their empire of vanity. Where any search for a product brings up 10 pages of SEO'ed results to some unknown web stores before it brings up the manufacture's page and then an other 20 pages before it brings up honest reviews of the product.
I guess it's the commercialist(I guess that is a word, it's in spell check) society we live in. The scariest thought is that there are a lot of people out there that think there is no other way. They don't understand that sometime you may want to give your knowledge away just to enrich the world around them for the betterment of society as a whole instead of the quick buck they may get today.