techlash Concepts

The New Class Conflict

by Joel Kotkin · 31 Aug 2014 · 362pp · 83,464 words

. 28. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Silicon Valley” (by Michael Aaron Dennis), http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/544409/Silicon-Valley; Adrian Wooldridge, “The Coming Tech-lash,” Economist, November 18, 2013. 29. G. William Domhoff, Fat Cats and Democrats: The Role of the Big Rich in the Party of the Common Man

…

Reveals Alleged Silicon Valley Anti-Poaching Scheme,” PCMag, January 30, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399555,00.asp. 66. Wooldridge, “The Coming Tech-lash”; PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, “PwC’s M&A Outlook Reveals Dealmakers’ Increasing Focus on Quality Execution in Competitive M&A Market,” press release, July 23, 2013, http

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

by Ben Tarnoff · 13 Jun 2022 · 234pp · 67,589 words

smaller but making it worse. Since 2016, a mood of distrust has congealed around the large tech companies that dominate the internet. Often called the “techlash,” it has become a fixture of US media and politics. The belief that the internet is broken has become a new common sense. The brokenness

…

, because privatization is the process that made the modern internet. It is also the process that set in motion the crises that have provoked the techlash. Into the Stack The internet started out in the 1970s as an experimental technology created by US military researchers. In the 1980s, it grew into

…

internet’s privatization. Understanding this story, and understanding it as a single story, helps explain the origins of the modern internet and its crises. The techlash is nothing if not a belated reckoning with the legacies of privatization. But if its critiques remain confined to the symptoms and fail to grasp

…

that were hiding in plain sight. What was once business as usual now became the basis of Capitol Hill hearings. The “techlash” had arrived. As the years have passed, the techlash has persisted. Its imprint appears to be permanent. The spectacle of the tech industry behaving badly has become routine, even cliché

…

by smaller and more entrepreneurial firms. And they believe that such a restructuring would go a long way toward addressing the concerns raised by the techlash. But would it? Nick Srnicek notes that more competition could very well make things worse. “After all, it’s competition—not size—that demands more

…

. Toward the Forest 148, The soundtrack to the privatization … “The Teflon industry”: Rana Foroohar, “Year in a Word: Techlash,” Financial Times, December 16, 2018. 148, At some point … The Financial Times called “techlash” one of 2018’s words of the year; it was also a runner-up for the Oxford Dictionary’s

…

, 86, 94–95 state surveillance of, 64–65, 66 and submarine fiber-optic cables, ix–x, xii, xiv, 29–30, 56, 65, 113 and the techlash, 149, 152, xii, xiii, xv universal protocol for, 9, 11–12, 19, 88, 110, 113, 159, 172 and universities, 52, 88, 109, 169 and US

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

by Brian Merchant · 25 Sep 2023 · 524pp · 154,652 words

as progress—if you get crunched up in the gears of progress, well, that’s the price of it!” They contend that the so-called techlash—the backlash against major tech companies that cropped up in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, growing concerns over Google and Amazon’s

…

, and so on—demonstrates a deep-seated anger at the domination of Big Tech, but that it has already been co-opted by the industry. Techlash was shortlisted for Oxford English Dictionary’s 2018 word of the year. It was defined by the OED as “a strong and widespread negative reaction

…

its current remit, the hosts think. “It wasn’t long ago since tech was covered breathlessly,” Sadowski said, “but Silicon Valley has co-opted the techlash—” “But the apocalyptic language remains,” Ongweso chimed in. “The recommendations are ass, like, ‘We should have a government watchdog.’ If you think this is a

…

threat to human life and democracy, then what is a watchdog going to do?” “Luddism is more like the techlash that we need, and the techlash that people were hoping for and wanted,” Sadowski said. “Not for a nicer Silicon Valley. No, Silicon Valley is rotten to the

…

-a-luddite-literature-e454bf5a5076. 3. The tech worker and author Wendy Liu, Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism (London: Repeater, 2020). 4. Techlash was shortlisted “Word of the Year 2018: Shortlist,” Oxford Languages, https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2018-shortlist/. As of 2023, the OED

…

Online defines techlash as: “Originally: opposition to digital or computer technology. In later use: spec. a strong and widespread negative reaction to the far-reaching power and influence

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone · 10 May 2021 · 569pp · 156,139 words

Silicon Valley, where the recoil from longtime residents to the changes wrought by companies like Google and Facebook came to be known colloquially as the “techlash.” In Seattle, it was very specifically an “Amazonlash.” Absorbed with the mechanics of its relentless growth, Amazon executives and employees were easy to vilify. Unlike

…

Seattle also represented something broader: resistance to tech companies and to the dizzying changes they were bringing to their communities. That was the so-called techlash, unfolding outside the visible spectrum of Amazon’s well-compensated senior leadership. Their failure to recognize these forces was about to have serious repercussions. In

…

however it works, that will not stop us from serving customers.” In private though, Bezos prepared to take a less accommodating approach toward the intensifying techlash. In the fall of 2019, the S-team and Amazon’s board of directors read The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business

…

Employee Hours Tax, 303–5 income, 291–92, 303 sales, 11, 213, 250 Taylor, Mitchell, 310 Taylor, Tom, 51, 166, 167 Teamsters, 216–17, 242 techlash, 290, 305, 349–53, 364, 380 see also big tech companies Telesat, 279 Tencent, 88 Tesco, 190 Tesla, 235–36, 264, 282, 283, 294 Gigafactories

Reset

by Ronald J. Deibert · 14 Aug 2020

scope and scale, can leave one feeling exhausted and resigned. Perhaps that is why social media continue to grow in popularity in spite of the “techlash.” Perhaps this explains why so many of us choose to remain in a state of blissful ignorance, never untethered for too long from our precious

…

. Untangling these will be exceedingly difficult — a topic we’ll address in more detail in the final chapter. * * * In 2018, a new term circulated widely: “techlash” — not only a growing irritation with social media’s ill effects but a major pushback against the entire roster of technology platforms. Let’s face

…

biggest technology firms have been on an astonishing bull run”: Economist. (2020, February 21). So much for the techlash? Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/02/21/so-much-for-the-techlash Facebook’s stock jumped close to 2 percent: Jee, C. (2019, July 15). Facebook is actually worth

Lurking: How a Person Became a User

by Joanne McNeil · 25 Feb 2020 · 239pp · 80,319 words

Trump’s election, when Facebook’s influence came into question, a consonant but mistaken narrative began to take shape in the media. This was a “techlash,” journalists explained. According to this narrative, users were once very happy to share their lives on Facebook. The company was believed to be a net

…

to its size. After all, who benefits when the story is that the crisis of Facebook is a new one? This problem is not a “techlash,” as new-tech journalists and tech pundits positioned it. The “tech beat” scarcely existed four years ago, although Facebook and other poisonous platforms had cursed

…

to enact a better internet. Worse still, Silicon Valley—handed this truncated timeline of its ills—is already working to co-opt and neutralize the “techlash,” similar to how it weakly responded to the matter of diversity just a few years before. Calls for “ethics” are coming from inside the big

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao · 19 May 2025 · 660pp · 179,531 words

presidential election would shock the left-leaning workforce of the tech industry into self-reflection. As upheaval ripped through companies like Meta and Google and techlash sentiment gripped the public, AI researchers, too, began to question whether the field had moved too quickly to yoke its technologies to corporate bottom lines

…

and, 249 Imagen model, 240, 242 LaMDA, 153, 253–54 neural networks, 100–101 Project Maven, 52 speech recognition, 100 Sutskever and, 50, 100–101 techlash, 51 Transformers, 120–22, 158–59, 160, 165–66, 169, 171–73, 235 valuation, 70 Waymo, 100 Google Brain, 72, 159, 162, 166, 167 Google

…

, 105 compute, 305 content moderation, 190, 192, 209 data centers, 274–75, 281, 285 Llama, 305 OpenAI and, 159, 406–7 open-source, 304–5 techlash, 51 Threads, 260 Metz, Cade, 80, 90 Metz, Luke, 247, 406 Miceli, Milagros, 414–15 Michelangelo, 81 Microsoft Altman and, 355–56 firing, 4, 6

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg · 11 Oct 2021 · 521pp · 118,183 words

has civil-military fusion. The United States has techgovernment confusion. And while our two coasts battle each other, the authoritarians are taking aim at democracy. Techlash Hard as it may be to imagine today, the marriage was once a happy one. Historian Margaret O’Mara calls the U.S. government “the

…

the country’s elected representatives. By 2016, the Hill and the Valley confronted what celebrity breakups typically term “irreconcilable differences.” America entered a full-fledged techlash. Democrats were furious that Moscow had manipulated social media to facilitate Donald Trump’s election—and even angrier that the industry seemed so blasé about

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants

by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi · 14 May 2020 · 511pp · 132,682 words

-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017). 28.Eve Smith, “The Techlash against Amazon, Facebook and Google—and What They Can Do,” Economist, January 20, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/01/20/the

…

-techlash-against-amazon-facebook-and-google-and-what-they-can-do. 29.Haley Sweetland Edwards, “The Masters of Mind Control,” Time, April 23, 2018, 30–37,

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words

to make it a priority. By the middle of 2018, the bloom was off the rose. The big social networks had been stung by a “techlash” of public criticism. Their top executives had all been dragged into Congress and berated over how Russian actors had used their systems to meddle in

…

human moderators, which Twitter pays to adjudicate reported tweets, are overwhelmed. The same goes for Facebook and for Google. Those companies also responded to the techlash by announcing they were hiring ever more human moderators, whose job it would be to examine reported posts, pictures, and videos. It was a lot