It started with gmail IMO. That was an early milestone of the evil empire. They announced mining your emails to build an ad empire. I remember being bewildered that nerds on forums were going nuts over 1GB of storage. What a shit trade off I thought. But what did I know then especially relative to the expertise of internet nerds.
Gmail was launched around 2005 which means the concept was in development several years before. That puts the timeline around 2000 probably. Google was evil from very early on.
I'll be the one to say it. We have been living in good times. The internet has the vocal crowd of naysayers. I believe they are signal boosted by "the algorithms" sowing the discontent bubble. That's why there hasn't been much counter-movement. Enough people are still too comfortable.
And you all can spare me the belligerent replies about how this or that sucks for whoever or whatever. That doesn't strike the fact that things are good for enough people such that there isn't mass breakdowns of social order.
It's actually kind of crazy how the system keeps bending yet nothing has completely snapped. We're not even at Occupy Wall Street level.