These are strange times for Silicon Valley. “Tech” no longer feels like a discrete industry, or a cluster of upstart companies in Palo Alto riding the optimism of the Obama years. It’s the infrastructure underpinning nearly every other industry. AI, cloud computing, logistics, finance, agriculture, retail, media: almost everything now runs through systems controlled by a handful of megacorporations. Their software coordinates how we work, communicate, consume, and, increasingly, how we think (nbd…).Article continues after advertisement
That’s the central paradox: public resentment toward Big Tech has never been greater, and the AI boom has only widened the backlash. The technologies people rely on most are also the ones they trust least. For much of my millennial working life, companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta were cast as humanity’s best hope rather than one of its biggest problems. Today, executives are hauled before Congress. Antitrust cases keep piling up. Whistleblower memoirs have become international bestsellers. (Last summer, at the bookshop in Paris’s Orly Airport, Careless People was one of only two English-language books I could find—the other was Harry Potter.) And yet, because these companies now underpin so much of modern life, outrage has done remarkably little to loosen their grip. We’ve reached the point where AI products have become daily habits even as we’ve lost any real trust in the corporations that made them.
