Four Bubbles Wearing One Trenchcoat: A Developer's Autopsy of the AI Boom vs. the Dot-Com Crash
by Mahan (@MahanKenway on GitHub)
There's a stretch of rural Louisiana and Kansas where, if you dig a few feet down next to certain county roads, you'll still find coils of unlit fiber-optic cable from 1999. Nobody ever turned the light on. Companies like Global Crossing and 360networks buried something like tens of millions of route-miles of glass on the belief that internet traffic was doubling every three months, financed it with debt, and were bankrupt before a lot of that fiber ever carried a single packet. Some of it sat dark in the ground for over a decade before anyone lit it up.
I keep thinking about that buried glass every time another "AI capex" headline shows up in my feed. Not because I think GPUs are about to become the new dark fiber (I'll get to why that comparison is way more complicated than it sounds), but because it's a good reminder that bubbles don't leave behind vague "irrational exuberance." They leave behind physical, dated, traceable stuff. Warehouses. Turbines. Debt schedules. Depreciation tables. If you want to know whether something is actually a bubble, you don't ask whether people online are excited about it. You go look at the concrete. Or in this case, the substation.
