Until all of a sudden, things changed and Silicon Valley’s “regulatory exceptionalism” came to an end. And what changed wasn’t so much that people objected to Silicon Valley’s tech lords making money, as that people began to doubt whether Silicon Valley was, anymore, working to make ordinary people richer and more capable. Silicon Valley seemed to have gone from the hammer-wielding woman in that famous “1984” Apple commercial, to the Big Brother figure up on the screen in that famous “1984” Apple commercial.

Where, a decade or so ago, the tech world’s products served to liberate us from the control of big institutions — I wrote a book on that! — now they seem designed to keep us under the thumb of big institutions. People used to start blogs to express themselves. Now they communicate via giant quasi-monopoly “social media” sites that mute and ban users over their politics. Your computer and phone used to be ways for you to learn more about the world than had ever been possible before in human history; now your devices have turned into tools for governments and corporations to keep tabs on you in ways that have never been possible before in human history.