I'll put on my devil's advocate hat and try to argue for the positive social impact of tech companies. Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more ea

I'll put on my devil's advocate hat and try to argue for the positive social impact of tech companies. Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more easily with each other. People call Google out for being an ad company. Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. Showing you an ad for burgers near your house when your recent YouTube watches have all been for burger reviews is doing exactly that. Facebook helps people connect and stay in touch over long distances (and so does email). I have a brother in Canada, I live in France. We talk via WhatsApp. Basically every person I know living in a country far from their family uses WhatsApp or a similar service to communicate. Once again, those much vilified ads that everyone always complains about are helping people find things that might improve their lives. Netflix entertains people. It gives them an escape from the tedium of their boring office jobs in tech companies (;D) Amazon (and Ali Baba) has unified the world's market place. You can now get basically anything from anywhere, delivered to your house in less than a week. The long tail of platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled hobbists and enthusiasts that would have spent their whole lives in isolation to connect and share their passions. We're having this discussion on an online communications platform made by a tech company (Y Combinator). It is enabling us to both learn more about the world and improve errors in our thinking by communicating, despite that fact that we very probably live in completely separate world and will never have a chance to meet in real life. The abundance of computing power and internet connection has spread knowledge throughout the world and is probably responsible for a fair amount of scientific progress. Any 10 year old with a basic smartphone now has access to basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge, especially if they use SciHub and LibraryGenesis. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read a Wikipedia article about the Roman empire, maybe in Dutch or German to improve my knowledge of those languages, using Google Translate if I have to, and thank God that I get to live in these wonderful times. <3