Ten years ago, it was considered cool to work for a tech startup. It still is (in case my boss is reading this) but the world is arguably a much more ‘tech-sceptic’ place today. The film director, Werner Herzog –always keen to make a profound point about the big picture– has said that ‘the last Century, the Twentieth, saw the demise of great social utopias. Our Century, the Twenty-First, will inevitably see the demise and the collapse of technological utopias.’ We will not colonise Mars. We will not achieve immortality with genetic manipulation. ‘Mind my word’, he says, ‘when we meet in one hundred years!’
We’re not here to predict the future, but it would be fair to say that people used to be much more optimistic about technology. Startup life was glorified, idealised and romanticised in documentaries like John Gau’s Triumph of the Nerds (1996) and movies like The Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999). Later in 2010, films like The Social Network celebrated Mark Zuckerberg’s success by portraying the founding of Facebook as a David-against-Goliath battle between good (Zuckerberg) and evil (the Winklevoss twins). Many people blamed bankers and politicians for the scandals and crises which mired the 2010s. The startup scene was seen as a less stuffy, less corrupt and potentially more lucrative alternative.
Fast forward to the 2020s and it seems like techies are now the bad guys. The potentially negative impact of social media was explored in Jeff Orlowski’s documentary, The Social Dilemma. ‘The Algorithm’ has superseded ‘The Man’ as the phrase which people, or at least conspiracy theorists, use to make reference to the mysterious, all-controlling ‘system’ that guides and prays on our every move. Bezos is the new Rockefeller, the rich person that everyone loves to hate.
This matters for investors. Cultural trends feed through to economic and political change, especially when regulators get involved. Political and economic factors in turn drive share prices. The prices of Amazon, Cisco, Meta and Microsoft have all fallen over the last year. These companies are also interesting because directors at these firms are selling shares in the companies they run…
Directors Selling Big Tech
Meta
Meta’s Chief Legal Officer, Jennifer Newstead, has been selling shares in her company (see table below). Her firm faces problems. People seem to be logging into the platform less frequently. Facebook revealed the number of…
