"...But these days, it seems like ev­ery oth­er day I read a chill­ing anti-tech rant, usu­al­ly writ­ten by some­one smart, ar­tic­u­late, and (like me) left­ist..."

There's an extremely interesting thing going on. Observing the mess tech has made does not seem to be related to political affiliation. I know people on the left, right, and center that are all beginning to realize that we're creating a dystopian future, not a happy one.

As a libertarian, I'm concerned that we've created "Knowledge Overlords" with Facebook/Google/Apple/Amazon/etc the likes of which mankind has never seen. They know all, they see all, they tell us what's true or not. And no matter how much they have, they only want more.

Even more disturbing, they're coopting efforts to fix other areas. Don't like Nazis? I don't. Never cared for criminal gangs or terrorists. Some of these folks should be left alone. Some of these folks need action by society. But our overlords have decided that these people should cease to exist. So they're using their huge infrastructure to deploy AI to intercept these people's communications to the rest of us and mute them.

Now whether you like this or not -- and I don't -- let's honestly look at what's happening. These giants are creating a walled garden internet that no new provider could hope to emulate. They've got censors, filters, hoards of people watching cat pictures being posted, on the lookout for a stray boob or white supremacist. Their talking point? They're helping us. They're taking a stand for what's right, helping the internet be a better and safer place. Maybe so. But they're also preventing any new Googles, or any new Facebooks. All they need to do is keep making their filters better and better to the point where the public demands them and they're impossible to reproduce by startups. Competition? Problem solved.

What this tells me is that this nirvana we're in, where people of all political persuasions agree there are serious problems, is not going to last. Instead these companies will position themselves with certain political causes and then anybody who disagrees will be accused of being a political wanker. In my example above, in the states at least, if I tried to defend the ability of loser Nazis to post online, people would automatically lump me in with some group, perhaps the alt-right. The tech companies are taking their quest for domination and turning it into just another political issue -- one that might go for decades unresolved as the usual suspects argue about it.

Right now most all reasonable observers agree there is a problem. We all used to agree on most all of the aspects of the problem. That's decreased to 70-80% agreement as these companies politicize things. Look to see it decrease even further as they continue to "help" us with various social issues they find troubling.

General agreement is being turned into just-another-political issue. In kindness, I think this is because for every thousand really smart SV entrepreneurs, there is but a tiny number of them who actually think about and understand the societal implications of what they are doing. Perhaps these big companies are cynically manipulating the discussion to prevent any action. Perhaps they just don't know. In either case, the effects are the same. Good intentions don't count for much.

There is much darkness here.