I think there must be some potential for a usenet revival. The infrastructure is all still there. The binary groups are still flowing with gigabytes of piracy and porn. With some exceptions, most of the text groups are wastelands inhabited only by a few spammers and cranks. There are a few operators who try to preserve the original vision, e.g. eternal-september.org .
It's still a potentially useful discussion system, based on open and documented standards, with no greedy corporation or psychopathic billionaire in charge to run it into the ground. I really think it could be worth doing some brainstorming to try to figure out how to bring it back to life.
But then my thought is - how could this be re-created?
We have the technology. And there's definitely still a lot of smart & interesting people who talk about things online.