George Packer sees the “invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy”:
[T]he sheer size of the tech giants, and the economic and political power that comes with this, generates much less skepticism than Rockefeller and Morgan ever inspired.
One reason, I think, has to do with the sense in which these companies are everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous in our lives but with no physical presence or human face. They are regarded by many users as public resources, not private corporations—there for us—and their own rhetoric furthers this misperception: Facebook’s quest for a “more open and connected world”; Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” and its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”; Amazon’s ambition to become “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Because these endeavors seem to involve no human beings, no workers, other than ourselves—the supposed recipients of all the benefits—it takes an effort to realize that the tech economy is man-made, and that, as with the economies that preceded it, human beings have the capacity to shape and reform it for the public good.
The Dish 