The most hated people in America are leaders of big tech companies. This definitely wasn't true when I got into the industry, so how did we get here?

Our current tech environment can trace its roots to the personal computer revolution of the 70s and 80s. There was a real DIY swagger to many of the companies producing consumer grade hardware and software in the early days. The same garages that were spitting out fuzzbox punk bands were also birthing personal computer pioneers with big ideas about how they were going to change the world.

Over time, the portrayal we get of this period has been simplified into a dramatized competition between Apple and Microsoft 1, but there were many other players involved. Of equal importance to the business environment was the cultural environment. It was a time of dreamers, hackers, and bullshitters.

The hacker ethic has, in particular, developed a mystique over time. It persists to this day as a counterculture defined by learning-by-doing, where finding cheap clever solutions is prized, where whimsy and joy and humor are valued and ceremony and credentials are not. The hacker may have a lofty vision, but they are in it for the love of the game.

As the personal computer revolution broadened access to computing, the need for software also increased. Software engineers, no longer limited to time-sharing on campus and industry DEC "minicomputers", were starting to question both the cost of entry and their inability to fix broken software. It was at this time that the free software movement started to gain traction, due in no small part to the efforts of RMS, a "dreamer" who is an embodiment of much of what is good, bad, and ugly about hacking.

For a long time, I mistook the FOSS ecosystem's spirit of openness, drive toward collective ownership of code and processes by workers rather than capital, general ambivalence or even open mistrust of corporations, and focus on collaboration as evidence of a strong strain of leftism in software. This might not be entirely inaccurate, but unfortunately, it's just as simply explained by a group of embittered narcissistic outcasts who want free stuff and are desperate for recognition and control they feel they lack in their day-to-day lives. They take pleasure in disrupting power structures because they view the people who run the establishment as inferior.

By the late 90s, the personal computer revolution had primed the market for a new technical revolution: the internet, and especially the World Wide Web. Microsoft was slow to react to this change, so it attempted to leverage its ubiquity as the OS provider of 95%+ of computing devices out there to try and gain a competitive advantage. In 1998, the US still had a functioning federal government, so this went down poorly.

These kinds of shenanigans went against the hacker ethic, and tech company CEOs were still new money interlocutors in the halls of power, so they were punishable in ways that the good old boy CEOs of Exxon Mobil or Philip Morris simply weren't.

People in the FOSS movement, for their part, began stylizing Microsoft's initials "M$", just truly devastating stuff. Microsoft's dominance went down poorly in the wider culture as well. Bill Gates was the richest person in the world, seldom a popular position to have in the first place, but on top of that he was uncharismatic and awkward.

By the year 2000, 13 of the top 20 companies by market cap were tech or communications companies. Then the dot bomb happened. That dominance collapsed as fast as it had arrived, before its players really had time to entrench themselves as a political force.

Despite the dot bomb killing luminaries like pets.com, the future of big tech would still largely be defined by the internet. Microsoft's transgressions showed that it was no better than the previous generation's great evil giant, IBM, which it had supplanted at the top of the tech pyramid. Trying to not be that became a defining feature of the internet startup era. Google's famous "don't be evil" motto was in some sense a vow that they would not fall victim to Microsoft's oedipal transgressions.

Instead of treating people like resources, instead of a thick layer of incurious and unskilled middle manager boss men sauntering up to your cubicle in your office park and requesting your latest TPS report, internet startups were founded by engineers, and they would treat these engineers like people. Non-engineers... well maybe we'll get to that, but baby steps. Employees would get generous stock packages, free meals, and playful perks like ping pong and foosball tables that lightened the office atmosphere.

It's hard to argue that these weren't among the best wage jobs in the history of the industrialized west. Monetary compensation was excellent, personal growth and physical and mental wellbeing were prioritized, and workplaces were vibrant and fun.

Alas, every silver lining has a touch of grey. If you bring your "whole self" to work, you might have none leftover when you get home.

This really did lead some people to ruinous burnout, but the rewards were often not just life changing but life defining. Many early employees at foundational tech companies built generational wealth from their options, and many many more made wages that were comparable to highly valued lawyers and surgeons.

The internet startup era, like the personal computer revolution, was largely centered on the west coast, and carried over a lot of cultural DNA from that earlier time. But something important had changed. Hacker culture had given way to startup culture, a sanitized simulacrum of hacker culture where the optimism and playfulness and risk tolerance were retained, but where the bullshitters had gained ground.

Startup culture is about ideas and execution. It's about thinking big. Doing things that don't scale. It's about putting together a pitch deck, raising an absurd amount of money to deliver burritos via drone, and then learning from that failure to come back a better founder for round 2. It's about lying to your customers and your investors about how things work until you can make that lie the truth.

There are admirable things about startup culture, but an important thing separates it from hacker culture: it's purely about making money. Solving problems for people is only a means to that end, and when these start to delaminate, things go down poorly.

Then the financial crisis of 2008 hollowed out industries and jobs that were already teetering. When people looked around, what they saw was the finance and auto industries being bailed out, the tech industry emerging virtually unscathed, and everything else being decimated. This is the start of our current ressentiment.

By the early 2010s, it was clear that some of what was lost wasn't coming back. Software was "eating the world", and the people left behind were urged to learn to code. This would eventually go down poorly.

But tech companies and tech culture's place in the wider culture hadn't yet deteriorated. Apple had brought about a third revolution, the smartphone, built atop the previous two, but broadening access to nearly 33% of the global population. These devices were so intuitive that many people who had been intimidated by personal computers eventually joined in. Google had spent 15 years giving away powerful and best-in-class products like search, maps, and Gmail for free. Facebook was keeping you in contact with your school mates, and making sure that your parents were being kept up to date with their grandkids.

Something had been brewing in the political makeup of tech companies. Technology companies and their workers were largely viewed to be on the center-left of the political spectrum, and not without reason. Being a part of the industry requires a fairly high level of education, and the more educated you are, the less likely you are to vote for the GOP.

Turns out if you hire mostly young, highly educated graduates from Berkeley and MIT, you tend to get people to the left of the median F150 owner. When the tech industry expanded into NYC, they did not do so in Staten Island because their prime labor pool lived in Brooklyn.

The actions of the tech companies and the wider tech ecosystem also reinforced this perception.

The gender gap in STEM had been a problem for decades, and it was increasingly openly discussed as a problem and a missed opportunity in industry during the 2010s. Although these problems lie deep within our culture and our society, many companies and public tech spaces such as conferences strove to reorient themselves to address this from the top down. Even though we knew there was a vast gap in the STEM population we were drawing from, if we could support female and minority voices, we could at least try to inspire the next generation to match the equality that we could merely project and make underrepresented people feel welcome.

This extended to the rise in the visibility of people with transgender identities, which has been expressed disproportionately among software engineers. The struggle for trans rights and cultural acceptance was in no small part championed and supported by the people in tech, who by and large were happy to utilize their status and power to further that cause.

This, sadly, didn't always go down well.

By the end of the decade, the public perception of these large internet companies was eroding quickly. The iPhone, an amazing device that could free you from boredom and connect you to anyone, anywhere, anytime, was becoming a dangerous addiction from which there was no escape. The large online platforms started to decay as they achieved monopoly status and strove to extract more value out of their users regardless of the impact on their wellbeing. Sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, once a place where people could subscribe to friends and creators to read and watch their content, became places driven by algorithms designed to spoon-feed rage bait and drive up engagement numbers for advertisement dollars.

Smash cut to present day.

Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, seldom a popular position to have in the first place, but on top of that he is uncharismatic and awkward. He also owns one of the world's most important social media companies, which he uses to air his anti-trans grievances and raise the profile of fascist and racist sentiment.

Tech company CEOs sat front and center on inauguration day, their reward for helping a man who instigated a violent attack on the nation's Capitol become president for a second time. Need a villainous archetype? Choose one of these guys.

The next technical revolution is upon us: AI. At least, we think it is. We thought we had one before, but apparently web3 went down poorly. And we have a big problem. Because startup culture has been replaced by something worse still.

The broader public backlash against DEI, which was in some part a deliberate campaign of right-wing agitprop, has led to gender and racial essentialism being flaunted openly on our largest public forums. It's all gamergate now, all the way down.

The spirit of inclusivity is dead. The optimism feels dead, too, replaced by a microwave background of dread that people might actually build the thing they're trying to build. The hacker spirit of cheaply solving problems in interesting ways has been replaced with grifters, bag chasers, and grindset psychopaths. We had these "hustle culture" people back in the early 2000s, but we were able to defuse them because influence was tied to popularity, and standing for nothing but making money is not usually too popular.

But that's not the world we have now. We have a world where AI generated content can drive astroturfing influence campaigns that feel indistinguishable from a real shift in public sentiment, an era where that influence is freely bought and sold, where the leaders of our industry and our politics fully buy into the idea that you can simply fake it forever and define your own reality, your own facts, and your own mathematics. The truth is challenged like never before, and I only hope that nature remembers it cannot be fooled.

If you think that I only lament the direction of the tech industry because they've veered away from my personal politics, or because I'm trapped in a liberal bubble, then I've got some worrying news for you. Fewer people want new datacenters built near them than nuclear power plants. Negative sentiment has gone from 47% in 2025 to 70% in 2026.

The brand of AI is so toxic that it's incredibly difficult to collect information about the industry without capturing a bunch of plastic bullshit in your net. The companies themselves are incentivized to lie to us about how close they are to gen AI, because their valuation is largely based on it being just around the corner. So we get a non-stop media campaign of hype and vague warnings of how powerful the new models are even as they hit diminishing returns on scaling. The boosters are indistinguishable in tone and content from a gathering of early Bored Ape Yacht Club members, and anti-AI reactionaries are so conspiratorial in their allegations that it's only a matter of time before one of them ends up at a pizza place with a shotgun.

The industry is in a weird place now, too. When F. J. Corbato wrote about problems they ran into when developing Multics, he referred to the high-level language they developed as an inadvertent research project, coining one of my favorite phrases in the process. Now, hyperscalers are throwing unicorn level cash at people to run research projects with little to no guarantees on any kind of return.

It's ironic. The people at the helm of our largest tech companies have shown themselves to be untrustworthy, and what they've created as their next big revolution is a system that is inherently untrustworthy itself.

  1. This is the part of the story I "wasn't there" for. If you want a deeper look at this fascinating time and place, you could do worse than watch Triumph of the Nerds or read Fire in the Valley.
May 19