In a new Economist essay, Adrian Wooldridge predicts that the tech sector will experience a backlash similar to what has been experienced by Wall Street and Big Oil, but I’m not convinced. A certain degree of blowback has already occurred, and it’s a deserved and healthy thing. Excesses of all kinds should be challenged, in Silicon Valley or anywhere else. Pre-philanthropy Bill Gates was a cutthroat jerk and Sean Parker is a narcissistic dunderhead. But the difference between bankers and techies is that the latter usually actually create something of value. And unlike fossil-fuel corporations, which damage the environment, the bigger tech companies (and many small start-ups) are aimed at making us greener. Those two factors will probably neutralize criticisms somewhat. From Wooldridge:

“Geeks have turned out to be some of the most ruthless capitalists around. A few years ago the new economy was a wide-open frontier. Today it is dominated by a handful of tightly held oligopolies. Google and Apple provide over 90% of the operating systems for smartphones. Facebook counts more than half of North Americans and Europeans as its customers. The lords of cyberspace have done everything possible to reduce their earthly costs. They employ remarkably few people: with a market cap of $290 billion Google is about six times bigger than GM but employs only around a fifth as many workers. At the same time the tech tycoons have displayed a banker-like enthusiasm for hoovering up public subsidies and then avoiding taxes. The American government laid the foundations of the tech revolution by investing heavily in the creation of everything from the internet to digital personal assistants. But tech giants have structured their businesses so that they give as little back as possible.”