Technology has opened many new opportunities for corporations and for everyday people.
However, the pace of new opportunities is way faster than the ability that governments have to regulate the new opportunities. It would seem that companies, entrepreneurs, and silicon valley have realized this and are using it as a business strategy. If I had to sum up the business strategy, I would say "Find a regularity system that can be exploited by rapid innovation".
While it's always been a business strategy to exploit legal loopholes, I think the difference is that companies exploit an entire regulatory system which is harder to update and takes longer. Airbnb, Uber, Mechanical Turk, are all examples of exploiting a regulatory system by creating a product and then quickly scaling it up to mass adoption before the practices introduced can be outlawed.
Once something has been massively adopted it's difficult to stop completely.
While the word exploit seems inherently negative I'm not trying to make judgment value, I think it's the correct description. I don't have a strong opinion about any of these companies or exploiting regulatory systems.
However, I do think that democracy needs to find a way to keep up with the forces taking advantage of its inherent systematic boundaries, such as being slow to react. I'm not sure what needs to change but I think when you have many US citizens participating in completely unregulated labor markets there is a problem that needs to be solved.