I'd say that is rose tinted glasses.

Society was not higher trust.

The very small, and reasonably tight nit communities that were online were higher trust.

And part of that was because there were far more potential real world consequences because the networks were small enough that even by the time I got online in '93 or so, if I you did something serious I'd be able to find a sysadmin etc. at your school or workplace or one of the few commercial ISPs and get someone to take it on themselves to get personally involved in rectifying the issue.

That doesn't scale very well.

By the time I co-founded my first company - an ISP - in '95, it was already rapidly starting to break down, as more and more people online with only a vague, impersonal commercial relationship to their network providers and who had options that meant consequences were rapidly diminishing.

High trust societies are so much more enjoyable and carefree. It’s too bad the culture now is to exploit everything so such places are going the way of the dodo.

It wasn’t so much higher trust, so much as naïveté. The lack of direct experience & exposure to that world. The lack of understanding of just how easy it was to fool people, and the lack of widespread exposure & attack surfaces to bad actors.

Computing changed the scale. The problems were preexisting though.