It’s Really Quite Simple: Republicans Hate Young People

The problem is that it’s been a minute since we’ve seen anything new from tech that has truly improved most people’s existence. People have been able to justify the opulence and societal hero complex of the Valley because of the vague promise that life would improve as a result of giving them that space. Except the last decade of tech has been filled with broken promises: the average person was not enriched by cryptocurrency, virtual reality remains … broken, and autonomous cars have mostly resulted in a dangerous open-air beta test on the world’s roads.

While it may feel good to contemplate digging some ditches for the oligarchs of Big Tech, it’s important to remember that they hardly accomplished all of this rack and ruin on their own. This malformed world has been shaped, principally, through public policy—and bad public policy at that. As The New Republic’s Tim Noah reported in September 2020, a study from the Rand Corporation laid out in no uncertain terms that a substantial amount of wealth owed to ordinary Americans was stolen, thanks to a half-century of unjust and inequitable economic policymaking. Over the course of decades, hundreds of wrong decisions have been made about whom to tax and what to regulate, who should get punished and what should get bailed out, and which finger should go on what scale. It is those decisions that have put us here: knee-deep in the Great Enshittening.

Here’s a campaign platform, if anyone wants it: Things should work. Trains should not derail. Rich nations should not struggle to provide pandemic relief. Concert ticket receipts should not look like epic poems. The internet should not be a wilderness of junk. And hey, just spitballing here, but maybe the next big pile of money should actually go to, say, the millions of college students who played by the rules and are now shackled with a lodestone of debt rather than going to the same old band of rich narcissists who put us in this hole. These are the kinds of political choices that we can and should make: Let’s bench this cabal of ungrateful plutocrats and put some fresh starters on the field. It took one set of policies to create this mammoth meatball of shit and failure we’ve all been asked to eat; it will take another set of policies to set a new table for the future.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.