{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "Gilded Rage is well written and covers a lot of what one might already know from paying more than passing attention to the tech industry and political landscape of the United States in recent years. It features all of the characters we (unfortunately) know and expect to make an appearance goes into modest detail on their malign impact on politics and society. It also, quite fairly, devotes time to illustrate the petulance and childishness of this class of tech \"elites\". What this books makes clear is that none of what these self-proclaimed tech titans are doing is new or all that innovative. If you've learned about the gilded age, you know this story (hence the title). The mans and mechanisms have changed a bit, but the outcomes, intents and results don't diverge all that much. With that said, let's take a step back and think, really think back to the last few memorable tech \"innovations\". Every technological innovation of any significance can be accompanied by uncomfortable societal change. What we've seen recently is no different. But what is increasingly clear is that the benefit of these disruptions accrues to those doing the disrupting, not to society. Social media has fractured society, destroyed journalism and upended our information ecosystem. Gig work eroded labor stability, discarded benefits and offloaded costs on to workers (autonomous vehicles now threaten to destroy these already hobbled...gigs?). AI is being sold as a revolution, data centers as infrastructure expansion but, in reality, it's a large-scale effort to deskill entire industries. Data centers may drive employment during the build out phase but, once that's done, those jobs will disappear into a much smaller number tending to the data center's maintenance. Everything sold as an innovation is instead a shiny distraction to pull ever more money upward towards an already perversely rich class of oligarchs. Their allegiance is to economic class and economic class alone. Their ideals are lies they tell themselves to make themselves feel better. Their foundations and charitable giving are tax write-offs aimed at rewriting their history from one of cruelty and selfishness to that of beneficence and selflessness. In helping to elect our current ruling class of imbeciles and kleptocrats, they've sought to cement their positions by gutting public institutions, capturing regulators and making what's left of hollowed out public institutions wholly dependent on services and functions contracted back out to their own companies. It's a dire situation we find ourselves in and author Jacob Silverman is smart to not offer passing hope, platitudes or high-minded solutions. I don't have solutions here either. We face a daunting, systemic set of problems. A class that's captured both economic and political power, a class that seeks to wield both in concert to capture cultural power. What I do know is that I've found solace in community. I've grown wary and weary of every new proffered innovation and have turned back to long-standing, boring technology. Every new, shiny, inevitable, essential thing is likely none of those things. It'll be easy to know where the loyalties of the company offering it lie and similarly easy to identify who it really benefits. You've seen what the technology industry has built, you've seen who it benefits, who it empowers and you've seen what they've done with that power. Why would you want or trust anything they do going forward?",
  "path": "/reading/books/9781399419987/gilded-rage",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-13T00:00:00Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:sttgf52vkk46f6yuknvqxvgh/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "tech",
    "politics",
    "nonfiction"
  ],
  "title": "Gilded Rage"
}