I don't recall it being hubris. What happened when Web browsers appeared is that there was a brief period when a university (usually you were at a university) would host your pages, and you could believe the decentralized dream (if you heard that part), but there was a sudden commercial gold rush, and motivations switched to greed (not hubris).
You didn't want to see X happen; you wanted you to get the money for X happening. And maybe that reduced to you want you to get the money, and X was a path to that, and the actual X didn't matter.
Also, there were relatively few people who already understood Internet, online, or software development at the time. Perhaps the majority of people pitching Web startups were all new to all of that.
CS department culture never recovered from the gold rush, and a lot of the gold rush ideas were institutionalized.
I've not fleshed out his angle on this, but the first thing that came to mind was the gamification of every social interaction. "Ratio-ing" on TWIT comes to mind. There was a time when we measured threads by the level of social engagement (response) rather than like/share and it was a good thing to have hundreds of replies and sub-conversations.
You didn't want to see X happen; you wanted you to get the money for X happening. And maybe that reduced to you want you to get the money, and X was a path to that, and the actual X didn't matter.
Also, there were relatively few people who already understood Internet, online, or software development at the time. Perhaps the majority of people pitching Web startups were all new to all of that.
CS department culture never recovered from the gold rush, and a lot of the gold rush ideas were institutionalized.