The Punch:

> Rather than trying to build a better mousetrap, big tech now makes much of its billions off surveillance

Salient points:

> embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomized by garage start-ups [...] America’s tech titans have attained oligopolistic sway over markets comparable to that of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt ... their rise has been the death knell of the Valley’s bracing entrepreneurial culture

> The start of this decline has coincided with a shift from the physical to the virtual. The Valley’s roots were in the old engineer-driven economy, one connected to the rest of the country, and to working-class America - somebody ... has to make the hardware. Today tech is dominated by a cognitive elite of Ivy Leaguers, management consultants and MBAs. [Leslie Parks: ] «We used to build the future ... Then we designed it, now we just think about it»

> [No more] the place where the world looks for a vision of the future ... The Valley ... will face fierce competition for tech supremacy - from other countries, and other parts of this one. // This reflects two different phenomena: rising competition from other regions - and an internal rot that has infected the Valley. In its first few remarkable decades, the Valley was defined by its openness, its culture of competition and connection to the general economy. The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs were, foremost, industrialists. They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money. // Over the last decade or two, the Valley has outsourced much of its industry. Apple produces two-fifths of its products in China, more than four times what is made in the United States. Other tech giants don’t make anything. Rather than trying to build a better mousetrap, big tech now makes much of its billions off surveillance - the source of the wealth generated by Google and Meta - and by disintermediating retail businesses. It is a far cry from the optimistic promise of a better tomorrow on which the Valley was built

> David P. Goldman[: ] «the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies»

> The stranglehold of mega-firms and the associated Wall Street and venture capital money machine has undermined competition in fields from video games to artificial intelligence to cloud services to the metaverse and AI. To be sure, there’s some competition among the giants, much as there was between aristocratic clans in Europe or Japan’s feudal daimyo, but there are vanishingly diminished opportunities for the sort of startup that made up much of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposit base. Tech today is largely a game played between giants who, if they see promising technology, simply acquire it. ... Antonio García Martínez: «Feudalism with better marketing ... with little social mobility»

> [Some notes about politicization]

> [...] As competition declines, the incentive to manipulate information, and boost profits through surveillance, seems to be irresistible. This is far more pervasive in terms of political and cultural life than, say, the power of the Big Three in Detroit’s heyday. Henry Ford may have been an awful human being, but he couldn’t have surveilled his employees, much less his customers, like Google or Meta