A Political History of the Future: The Tech Billionaire at Lawyers, Guns & Money
It's been a long hiatus for A Political History of the Future, my LGM series about how science fiction depicts shifts in political, social, and economic systems. But the post that I finally got around to publishing today has been in the works for more than a year, and part of the reason that I took so long to put it together is that there kept being new material to incorporate and discuss. My topic is the figure of the tech billionaire, the internet-based successor to inventor-entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, and how he's been depicted in fiction--and especially science fiction--in the last few decades. By the 2000s, as personal computing and the internet became the new frontier of technological development, the entrepreneur-inventor had completed his transformation, from the more materially-grounded industrialist of Edison and Ford's type, to a prophet of cyberspace. Even when he was selling us physical gadgets—as Jobs did with the iPod and iPhone—what he