By James Quillian — Economist, Political Analyst, Teacher of Natural Law
The tech industry has been riding high for a long time, mostly on the back of advertising dollars. For years, the public needed tech more than tech needed the public. That balance has flipped. These days, the tech giants need the population a whole lot more than the population needs them, and they’re not handling the shift with much grace.
For the better part of forty years, the public has been treated as a herd of virtual human beings. Not real people—just anonymous shapes on a spreadsheet. AI has taken that habit and polished it to a shine. You get “no‑reply” emails that take a machine a split second to send, and you can lose half a day trying to fix whatever problem the machine created.