The dead-and-gone aspect of this high-tech nostalgia for when it was easier to grift one's way into the headlines is aptly symbolized in the idolatry which Marc Andreessen and other technology executives practice towards the California Gold Rush. They don't care what a disaster that really was, not with their gauzy and mostly fictional perspective on U.S. history. What matters to them about the Gold Rush was that "wealth" was just THERE, ripe for the plucking. All you needed to do was dig it up (or to work out how to swindle other prospectors and "entrepreneurs".) But the Gold Rush is no longer possible. Similarly there's no way to bring back the days when computers seemed so brand new as to be practically magical.

(cont'd)