NYT’s Farhad Manjoo notes:
“Whatever happened
to the tech industry’s grand, democratic visions of the future?
We are once again
living in a go-go time for tech, but there are few signs that the most
consequential fruits of the boom have reached the masses. Instead, the boom is
characterized by a rise in so-called on-demand services aimed at the wealthy
and the young.
With a few taps on
a phone, for a fee, today’s hottest start-ups will help people on the lowest
rungs of the 1 percent live like their betters in the 0.1 percent. These
services give the modestly wealthy a chance to enjoy the cooks, cleaners,
drivers, personal assistants and all the other lavish appointments that have
defined extravagant wealth. As one critic tweeted, San Francisco’s tech
industry “is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing
for me?””