Tech feudalism

>As happy as I am to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fired into space, this does not seem to be worth the collapse of representative government."

This is an extraordinarily angry and poorly reasoned piece. How exactly are Musk or Bezos causing the collapse of representative government? This kind of assertion needs to be supported in a robust way rather than tossed in as a barb.

>"Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven't been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate."

Is it really that unlikely that terraforming Mars would lead to advancements than help us better understand and take care of Earth? Of all the people to pin climate change on, why would this guy pick on the founder of Solar City and Tesla? Those two companies have been doing a great deal to shift energy consumption from burning fossil fuels towards using solar power and to replace gas-based cars with efficient electric cars.

How does someone who spends his time selling a bookmarking app and harassing people on twitter feel justified in attacking those actually moving clean tech forward?

>"These big five companies operate on a global scale, and partly because they created the industries they now dominate, they enjoy a very lax regulatory regime. Everywhere outside the United States and EU, they are immune to government oversight, and within the United States the last two administrations have played them with a light touch"

This is also false. Look at the intense scrutiny Apple and its suppliers have faced in China over environmental and labor regulations, for example. In fact, it would be fair to say that the "big five" US tech companies face far more scrutiny in China than either the US or Europe.

I suspect the same is true in Russia, Japan and other regions. Consider that Japanese regulators are currently examining Apple for anti-trust action related to its iOS/iPhone/App Store empire.

However, this kind of escapism is not unique to tech in California. California has been a parade of cults, hedonists and lunatics for a hundred and fifty years or more. Tech entrepreneurs are merely lunatics whose pre-occupations were commercializable, legal and transformative for a very large swath of the economy. What is indicted by tech is not engineering or capitalism, but an escapist and visionary way of life.

So, populism (what Trump represents/ed) is bad, but we appeal to populism when quoting the _popular_ vote count. It's an interesting irony.

>In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on companies headquartered in the United States.[]...And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data.

So those data centers in Ireland and the Netherlands, etc. are kind of fictional...