Posted on 08/11/2016 3:09:22 PM PDT by moonhawk
OUR SILICON VALLEY ROBBER BARONS08.10.16 11:00 PM ET Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets. A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring, risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better. Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control our future politics, media, and commerce seem without limits. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber may be improving our lives in many ways, but they also are disrupting old industries—and the lives of the many thousands of people employed by them. And as the tech boom has expanded, these individuals and companies have gathered economic resources to match their ambitions. And as their fortunes have ballooned, so has their hubris. They see themselves as somehow better than the scum of Wall Street or the trolls in Houston or Detroit. It’s their intelligence, not just their money, that makes them the proper global rulers. In their contempt for the less cognitively gifted, they are waging what The Atlantic recently called “a war on stupid people.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Sorry about the formatting. The excerpt should be three paragraphs, not one.
Olde time robber barons didn’t work so closely with big gov to get their payouts and solidify their monopolies....
Sounds like they don’t even employ Americans anymore. Like the business side of the UN resides in San Fran
Genius never was the same as wisdom. These propeller heads are going to learn that the hard way.
Perfect quote for this:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
-From C.S. Lewis’s essay anthology “God in the Dock” (1948)
At least Kotkin is pointing it out.
All of us who live and work in the center of it see it every day.
“Technocoolies” - Kotkin just added a new word to the vernacular.
And it rings true. Walk around downtown San Jose or Redmond and you think you’re in Mumbai.
So much for IT creating the new jobs everyone was supposed to get when the “old jobs” went to China.
When the Regressives look in the mirror, and try to convince themselves they’re “on the side of the little guy”, they will see the faces of Exploitation looking back at them.
The new Slavocracy....the Silicon Slum
There wasn't big govt or the level of coordination as we know it today, but the robber barons definitely had politicians in their back pocket.
Pace Lewis, I would say that their conduct doesn’t even sound like that which leads to heaven.
There’s always the kind of religion which is just for show in the end.
Yep, They are EVIL, Capitalists, they must be destroyed..
More like crony capitalists—capitalists in bed with government through crooked dealings and pocket padding.
Does amazon.com pay ANY taxes?
They left off Micro$oft, the true f@arting elephant in the room.
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