"A Historical Analog for This Fall From Grace Does Exist"

"There was a time when Americans loved and talked about the transcontinental railroads the way we loved and talked about the internet. The steel lines spanning the nation were, as the Stanford historian Richard White put it, 'the epitome of modernity.' '[Americans] were in love with railroads because railroads defined the age. The claims made for railroads by men who wrote about them were always extravagant,' White wrote in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. 'The kind of hyperbole recently lavished on the Internet was once the mark of railroad talk.'
"Then the public turned on the transcontinental railroads."

Alexis C. Madrigal at The Atlantic looks to the past when pondering the fate of today's tech barons.