The Magnificent Seven own the stock market. Elon Musk is the half-appointed drill sergeant of the federal government. We are all technology’s customers, enablers, victims and beneficiaries. We are in many cases the product itself — estranged from who we once were. It’s thus an obligation to question technology companies’ power, to expose their contradictions and blindness.
Catherine Bracy does so in a new, clear-eyed and unbowed book, World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy (Dutton, March 4). Yet technology’s power is evident in the book’s accomplishments and in Bracy’s inability to fully nail all of her charges or proposed solutions. Power is real: It eats worlds, and words. It cements systems so thoroughly that simply imagining alternatives becomes difficult, even when the need for those alternatives is increasingly inarguable.
