Are tech entrepreneurs replacing Wall Streeters as the rich bad guys in the popular imagination? It’s starting to seem that way, at least in the media. The clearest example of this new rich-guy-bad-guy casting shift was the summer’s hullabaloo surrounding Sean Parker’s wedding. A fictional Parker, an early investor in Facebook, played the role of corrupting influence in the Aaron Sorkin-David Fincher film The Social Network. The real life Parker held a haute-ren-faire-ish wedding in a California redwood grove, described in the press as an “ecological disaster” and reported to cost as much as $10 million. He replied by writing a 9,500-word reply to the journalists who had violated his privacy by writing about his wedding. Not long after, Vanity Fair ran a lush, authorized photospread of the event. In other words, Parker went from jerk to jerkier to jerkiest in the online court of opinion. A screenwriter inventing that character would have gotten notes from the studio that the assholism was too ridiculous to be believable.

And yet Parker has quickly become an archetype. Just as the story of one Goldman Sachs daughter’s over-the-top bat mitzvah became a Wall Street morality tale, Parker’s wedding has been covered that way, too, across sites that seem to be, lately, more sharply attuned to covering tech culture critically. “Tech is something like the new Wall St. Mostly white mostly dudes getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact,” economist Umair Haque argued on Twitter. Tech-world denizen Jesper Andersen tweeted a similar sentiment: “Change ‘startup’ to ‘hedge fund,’ ‘ecstasy’ to ‘cocaine’, and ‘douche-bag’ to ‘douche bag’ and you too can see SF is just another Wall St.” Or this, from Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey: “I saw the best minds of my generation building apps to send sexts and brag about fitness and avoid the poors.”

Like finance, tech has become the aspirational career for ambitious young people. Plenty of people walked out of The Social Network wanting to be the next Zuckerberg or Parker, just as college seniors reading Liar’s Poker or watching Wall Street missed the point and decided they wanted to be big swinging dicks. But not everyone. Americans have a complicated relationship with the idea of capitalistic meritocracy. For every Horatio Alger, there’s a Mr. Potter. In other words, those news reports of startup Uber offering helicopter service to the Hamptons, and all the other rich-tech-person problems that (some) apps set out to solve are both execrable and enviable.

“They’re young and monied and kind of obnoxious in the way that young and monied people almost always are,” said Mat Honan, a senior writer at Wired, of tech’s consumption culture. What is different about this scene, though, is the level of exposure. Now there are social networks that encourage flagrant displays of enviable lifestyle. (It’s a feedback loop: guy invents social network, gets rich, takes pictures of the fruits of his wealth, posts on said social network.) Or posts a rant about homeless people and ugly girls on Medium. Sharing is part of the fabric of the industry. Wall Street, on the other hand, still has a culture of privacy (at the office, anyway) and so its denizens’ most immature impulses are less likely to be published online via blogs or Twitter. (Banking shenanigans more often arise on Facebook, where many people think they're posting for their friends and not the public.)

Tech world conspicuous consumption isn’t quite the same as Wall Street conspicuous consumption. A Silicon Valley executive isn’t likely to spend his cash on bottle service and a Porsche; a trip up Kilimanjaro and a Tesla is far more the norm. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, who lives in San Francisco and is hardly a kneejerk critic of wealth, told me he plays a little game with himself where he counts the number of Teslas he sees in any given day. It used to be one a day, now it’s up to five or ten. That kind of lifestyle is certainly expensive (Teslas start at $62,000 or so, without any of the add-ons), but there’s also an element of virtuousness to it—which to some can be more grating than the unapologetic materialism of a stereotypical banker: I spend a lot of money, but it’s to save the earth, not to burnish my own image. And then there's Google Glass: an unsettling-to-the-rest-of-us status symbol that only a tech-head could love.