Rising tide of hostility toward Big Tech and its leaders is a reflection of users realizing the deal they have struck: their data for a free service
Stephen Marche / New Yorker :
Context & Ripple Effects
The hostility Stephen Marche describes did not appear overnight. A [[a:923578|Verge survey of US sentiment toward Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter]] in late 2017 already measured fraying trust on privacy and news accuracy, and by November that year Big Tech's gaffes around election interference and misinformation had compounded the erosion.
What changed by April 2018 was the framing: as the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed, users stopped seeing data collection as an invisible cost and started seeing it as the price they had knowingly paid for free services. Marche's essay is a snapshot of that moment of realization — and it predates the organized counter-movement that followed.
First-order effects
- Facebook and its peers face users who now read the free-service model as an explicit trade rather than a gift, putting consent language, privacy settings, and data practices under scrutiny they never had before.
Second-order effects
- Eroded public sentiment feeds a professionalized opposition: as later reporting on the well-funded network of lawyers and academics shaping Big Tech regulation shows, diffuse user anger gets converted into litigation and antitrust pressure such as the Google case.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the implicit data-for-services bargain gets renegotiated structurally — through regulators and courts rather than terms-of-service updates — turning what platforms treated as a default permission into something requiring active justification.
The trend: Public tolerance for the implicit data-for-services bargain is hardening from consumer grumbling into organized legal and regulatory opposition to Big Tech's data practices.