The second half of this is ridiculous speculation. No one knows what's going to happen in the future. I expect this discontent to grow, but I don't think that

The second half of this is ridiculous speculation. No one knows what's going to happen in the future. I expect this discontent to grow, but I don't think that most people have an issue with "tech firms". It's unfocused anger about economic stagnation and real estate malfeasance. I doubt the people being priced out of the Mission care strongly about PRISM. People are trying to direct this unfocused anger (which looks like it might be the nebula of a left-wing Tea Party) toward their own pet issues (surveillance) and it won't work that way in the long run. If this dog runs loose, it will go where it wants. Having traveled pretty extensively about the country, I think technology has a huge problem with "placism", coupled with an unhealthy obsession with pedigree. There's no good reason for technology to be one of the industries where location matters most. It should be the other way. But Sand Hill Road VCs won't take you seriously if you're more than 50 miles away, companies like Google keep the best projects in the Valley office, and having gone to Stanford matters more than a 150+ IQ. (That's not to say that "having a 150+ IQ", alone, should mean that much. But it is self-evident that a noisy signal of intelligence should be taken less seriously than raw intelligence itself.) It's unhealthy for technology, it's bad for the Bay Area, and it's catastrophic for the rest of the country. Now we're seeing pushback against technology's location perversion coming not from the engineers, but from Bay Area locals who are entirely disinterested in technology's placist dynamics, and who don't have strong opinions of technology either way, any more than Parisians in 1793 gave a shit which province got its swamps drained and how such decisions derived from machinations in Versailles. If there is a wave of violence in the U.S., it won't be "against tech firms" because tech is not a day-to-day problem for most angry Americans. (Besides, most cities would love to steal a few tech firms from San Francisco, whose people sense saturation and no longer want them.) It will be broader, less localized, and it will be, toward its end, very differently from what it was when it started. I don't think it's desirable, either; those sorts of processes are too nonlinear and volatile for anyone to hold blanket opinions either way.