Proclaiming that we live in a tech-centric society understates its saturation.
Software, specifically machine learning and AI, coupled with advanced manufacturing has delivered technology to street corners, schools, offices, factories, and even farm fields. This tech, much of it created in Silicon Valley, sits on your wrist, is carried in your pocket, integrated in the movies you watch, and maybe in the music you listen to. And it is certainly the means in which that Amazon package was ordered, sorted, and delivered to your doorstep.
It has turned its founders, executives, and middle managers into king-like figures, whose wealth and political influence mirrors the Gilded Age. Seven of the top 10 richest people in the world can tie their wealth directly to tech. Amazon co-founder, chairman, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is third, behind just Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, according to Forbes, which tracks wealth and the people who have it. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer round out the list.
And in this moment, the Bezos-owned Washington Post has gutted its coverage of them and the tech industry at large as part of a sweeping set of layoffs that affected more than 300 people. The team that includes tech, science, health and business was cut by more than half from 80 to 33 people, according to tech reporter Drew Harwell. The tech desk alone cut 14 people. Its San Francisco bureau is a shell.
Among those affected include reporters covering Amazon, artificial intelligence, internet culture, and investigations. The newspaper also laid off staff covering the media industry (which had previously reported on Bezos’ ownership over their own paper).
The Post cut its entire sports bureau and nearly annihilated its foreign reporting teams, including its Middle East desk, and reporters and their editors covering Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others. It closed its Books section, decimated coverage of culture and the DC Metro area, and laid off all reporters and editors covering race and ethnicity issues nationally.
The coverage of tech isn’t more important than social, economic, and geopolitical issues. But never before have the people exerting outsized influence on the world’s geopolitics and economy also been so directly responsible for stemming the global flow of information about it.
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