Joel Kotkin describes our slide toward a tech-oligarch-driven dystopia:

It goes without saying, this is not a matter of merely wanting to do good. These companies are promoting these new cities as fitter, happier, more productive, and convenient places, even as they are envisioning cities with expanded means to monitor our lives, and better market our previously private information to advertisers.

My first thought is to wonder whether Kotkin was consciously quoting from the song “Fitter Happier” from Radiohead’s album OK Computer, which starts with the lines, “Fitter, happier/More productive,” and ends with:  “Calm, fitter, healthier and more productive/A pig in a cage on antibiotics.”

[box type=”note” style=”rounded”]To Our Readers: We need your support to challenge the progressive mainstream media narrative. Your donation helps us deliver the truth to Rhode Islanders. Please give now.[/box]

My second thought is that it ultimately sounds simply like the progressive vision for society:

This drive is the latest expansion of the Valley’s narcissistic notion of “changing the world” through disruption of its existing structures and governments and the limits those still place on the tech giants’ grandest ambitions. This new urban vision negates the notion of organic city-building and replaces it with an algorithmic regime that seeks to rationalize, and control, our way of life.

There may be the thin difference that progressives want power while the tech oligarchs ultimately want money, but those amount to the same thing when all is said and done.