@dredmorbius@toot.cat@aral Who specefically should be exluded?
Your painting, or smearing, with a very broad brush.
I've been following these trends for .... it's hard to say, really. Online rights in the classic EFF / free software sense since the late 1990s. Surveillance since at least the early aughts. Social media a la Facebook seemed a poor choice from the start, though I'd participated in earlier platforms --- say, Slashdot, pre-dating registered usernames, Usenet.
Spam and online ad-blocking. DNS hijacking. PGP.
The really dark side though wasn't clearly apparent to me until the 2016 election cycle, thpugh I was starting to talk of "truth systems for the Internet" by 2015 (on Google+, now dead, though those posts are somewhere on the Internet Archive).
A lot of us are playing catch-up. The true visionaries who saw this all along are few. RMS likely comes closest and my read is that even he was surprised.
A lot of people, possibly you among them, were coming of age as this was breaking, mostly 2000--2015. I'm a bit older, but putting together the political and technological wasn't something I'd learned or realised fully until the past decade.
Othering seems too easy, cheap, and petty. Especially the vague sort.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows. Not all who are useful are friends. That doesn't make them less useful, at least for now.