Return on Intelligence, Part 1: Echoes
The article reflects on the author's experiences in the tech scene during the dotcom bubble, particularly focusing on the influence of the book 'Net Gain.' It discusses how this book provided a vision for the future of the internet and its potential to transform various aspects of society. The author draws parallels between the past and the current developments in AI, suggesting a similar paradigm shift is underway.
- ▪The author kept business cards from investor and founder events in San Francisco around 2000 for posterity.
- ▪'Net Gain' by John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong was influential in shaping the tech community's understanding of the internet's potential.
- ▪The author believes that AI is poised to bring about significant changes in commerce, communication, and culture, akin to the changes anticipated during the dotcom era.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 25 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Return on Intelligence: The Preface to an Eight-Part Series on the AI Bubble — Hacker News (AI / LLM)
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-echoes/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 20:20:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T20:33:20.987Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T20:33:20.987Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 9RtHzNY4f2Sf · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Part 1: Echoes The business cards in the drawer I still have two packs of business cards from people I met at investor and founder events in San Francisco around 2000. I kept them for posterity. At the time, I did not know quite what I was keeping. I was working with a company inside the dotcom bubble. I spent time around people seeking investment, pitching ideas, trying to explain why the internet would change everything, and why their particular company would be one of the companies that survived and captured the upside. There was a strange atmosphere around it all. It was not just greed, although there was plenty of greed. It was not just naivety, although there was plenty of that too.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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