This is utter crap.
As long as there has been a transfer of money, there has always been a market for faster access to information and faster use of that information. Its only in the last ten years that the speed is so fast it has to be done electronically.
There's a autobiography of a stock trader written in the early 1900s called Reminiscence of a Stock Operator where, in 1907/1908, the author is complaining that the time to execute a trade is too long. Specifically, he would notice a price movement on the tape, tell his runner to go (for example) buy 100 at $60, but by the time the runner was actually able to execute, the price was at $80, hence he's getting a worse price. The solution back then was faster runners, then faster communication (such as hand signals), then computers, etc.
Wall Street is not just HFT. Different firms have different ways of trying to make money. Some are speculators, some are value investors, some are arbitrageurs, some are market makers. Some companies trade to hedge risk in, for example, commodities that they expect to buy in the future. Others trade to hedge currency risk against countries they do business with.
To claim that Wall Street used to bet on companies that build things but now only bet on companies that make money is terrible mass-market journalism at best.