Okay, so we should regulate all those other companies and industries too? Is that your point?

Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible.

But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us.

In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.