the increasing politicization of Silicon Valley, and the transformation of its leaders from rebels into what Joel Kotkin calls "the new oligarchs," people who once talked about technology as liberation, but who now seem more interested in using technology as an instrument of control. It's not just NSA spying; it's that the companies gather data on everyone, with comparatively little legal oversight.
These giant tech companies are
political players now.Glenn reminds readers of the 1984 commercial introducing Apple's MacIntosh computer as the enemy of control.
Reynolds concludes,
And in the past, when people proposed laws to regulate data-gathering and collection by tech companies, tech lords benefited from the presumption that they were the good guys. As perceptions of them change, that presumption is fading. Expect more regulation to follow.Read more here.
But no system of regulation will inspire the kind of trust that the tech leaders once enjoyed for free. They may come to miss it, in time.
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