Tech bros must channel the moguls of old to get back in Americas good graces

In the face of massive public resistance and anger, tech bros need to start thinking like Andrew Carnegie and the “robber barons” of the Gilded Age — or even like Xi Jinping.The tech world is in bad odor these days.Social media’s addictive qualities have parents in such an uproar that Meta just agreed to pay out an $18 billion settlement, and data-center projects are facing rejection across the country. Yet for decades America’s tech industry was cherished as a center of innovation, a world in which hard-working entrepreneurs started businesses in garages and produced things that made everyone’s lives better.Because it was constantly innovating, it stayed ahead of government’s ability to regulate it, resulting in “permissionless innovation” — change that didn’t have to ask first.And that seemed fine, as it brought us personal computers, spreadsheets, word processing, databases, laptops, cell phones, smartphones and social media.Silicon Valley was making us richer and more capable, and if it made a lot of money in the process, that seemed only fair.Until suddenly, not quite a decade ago, Silicon Valley’s “regulatory exceptionalism” came to an end.Not because we resented the gobs of money Silicon Valley’s tech lords were making, but because we began to doubt whether they were still working to make ordinary people richer and more capable.They were no longer seen as the hammer-wielding woman in that famous “1984” Apple commercial, but as the Big Brother figure up on the screen in that famous “1984” Apple commercial.At the heart of the widespread bipartisan resistance to data centers and Flock cameras is our distrust of the people behind them. As recently as last year, Anthropic founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were publicly fretting that artificial intelligence could cause massive job loss and even human extinction: “There’s a 25% chance that things go really, really badly,” as Amodei put it.Today, on the verg...