once celebrated..........................

      The pioneers of the modern tech industry were once celebrated as exemplars of capitalist competition, illustrating what Joseph Schumpeter called the "creative destruction" that breaks up monopolies and allows others to rise from below.  But today's tech leaders increasingly resemble an exclusive ruling class, controlling a few exceptionally powerful companies, and like aristocracies everywhere they are often resistant to any dispersion of their power.  As the conquer ever more of the precious digital real estate, they are building a more stratified economic and social order, with widening class divisions, not only in the United States, but around the world.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class