there lurked a tenebrous techie will to power

Along with the cloistered military agencies that underwrote the research for the smartphone, the personal computer, and the internet, these institutions—yes, even NASA—shared a set of overarching goals: to extend the reach of machines to all spheres of human activity; to ensure those machines remained under private control, unaccountable to the public at large; to automate the countless individual political and economic decisions that constitute a nominally free society; and, oh yes, to get richer than the Medicis. The tech tycoons who ruled this land elevated their profane designs with a sacred mythography. The Singularity was its theological expression, but they wrote their own history, too, as I had seen at the Computer History Museum. Their preferred discourse was reverent contemplation of the lofty arc of scientific progress and homilies on the fortitude of a few pioneers of industry—Father Gates, Saint Musk. What time had they for the vulgar problems of the misfortunate many: housing, wages, police, debt, drugs, disease? Here was the dream of a new order that was at once futuristic and antiquated, a feudal fantasy played out on a sci-fi stage that looked deceptively like any boring stretch of asphalt in America.