When the internet went mainstream in the early 1990s, it was widely touted as a technology that would change the world. That was not hype, although some early commentators thought it was, even deriding it as a passing fad.

But early on the road to becoming ubiquitous, the internet did go through a “hype cycle”, in which thousands of companies popped up, making outlandish claims about how they were going to revolutionise their industries. Despite raising billions of dollars from eager venture capitalists, most of them disappeared during the dot.com bust of 2000-2001, when the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index lost about 80 per cent of its value.