Is the American Public Still in Love with Big Tech?
This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge
The sleepless giants of Silicon Valley have turned a fair few truisms of business on their respective ears in the past couple of decades — moreover, they have begun to challenge certain social principles in the American stance to business that once might have seemed dyed-in-the-wool. It could, long ago, have been credibly taken for granted that those whose views skewed towards the political right would defend bigger business in fact and in principle, while those who passed to the left would tend towards the skeptical voice.
For those eternal optimists of the will among you, the anti- or at least counter-competitive philosophy espoused by a great many of the tech giants might’ve seemed like the one thing likely to unite the American left with the right on matters of business ethics. A distrust of the public trust, a disdain for the Monopoly man (at least when you didn’t have that hotel on Park Place and hadn’t gotten to play as the little car) is so inborn within the American animus that Thomas Jefferson fought to include anti-monopolistic clauses within the Constitution, a potentially history-turning omission were there ever there one.
The truth nevertheless seems to be that, in a generally complicated picture of 21st century American tech culture, the…
