I was pretty young when the internet was still a haven for idealists, a place where I posted benign links to MySpace and downloaded music via obscure Blogspot pages. When I started college just before the Great Recession, the web wasn’t yet tangled up with the public personas of its leaders: Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg had just expanded Facebook beyond college dormitories. Engineer Jack Dorsey ran a humble “micro-blog” called Twitter that aimed to become the world’s chatroom. Jeff Bezos was known primarily for hustling books on Amazon, while Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin took their search engine public, with a cheery “don’t be evil” mantra.

Flash forward to 2020, and the tech giants and their leaders have come to dominate public discourse in a way that few other industries have. They’ve unleashed products that are basically indispensable in modern life. But many of the unprecedented conveniences fostered by the last several years of progress have been followed in equal measure by a host of unforeseen digital maladies.

These companies and their leaders, who entered the public sphere with unquestioned promise born of a starstruck media and thirsty venture capitalists, have not provided what they originally sold.

In short order, they erected their own walls throughout the web, turning it into a hyper-capitalist fever dream. Zuckerberg helms one of the planet’s biggest data-mining operations, posing very real threats to democratic processes internationally. Dorsey’s Twitter seems to have little interest in changing its reputation as a refuge for racists and hotbed of misinformation, and it’s never been quite that transparent about what, exactly, constitutes a violation of its terms. Bezos’s Amazon, which paid zero dollars in federal income taxes in 2018, tamps out its workers’ efforts to unionize. Both Google (currently led by CEO Sundar Pichai) and Facebook account for 60 percent of the entire U.S. digital advertising business. Their pseudo monopoly on online ad revenue dictates how media organizations shape their work, and sometimes drives layoffs throughout the industry.

Unlike, say, health insurance and pharmaceutical executives driving up medical costs, or even the titans of Wall Street, tech bosses have become celebrities in their own right. In the face of reports of white nationalist propagandizing on new platforms, smartphone addiction, the collapse of media advertising models, and data mining, we know exactly who to blame for all this. It’s the Tech Industry Villain.

Looking at a fresh-faced Mark Zuckerberg, still a Harvard student, giving interviews on CNBC about Facebook’s launch in 2004, it would have been hard to imagine the CEO sitting before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees in 2018, facing questions about his complicity in one of the greatest digital scandals in history.

Zuckerberg’s apology tour in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal—which saw the personal data of 87 million unwitting Facebook users harvested from an independent app developer and sold to a political consulting firm—was a masterclass in hollow promises to do better. After his Senate testimony, Zuckerberg took out full-page national newspaper ads declaring: “This was a breach of trust and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time.” Since then, however, Facebook has been envelopedin data scandals again and again.

Zuckerberg’s post-Cambridge Analytica mea culpa was an indication of how hard the industry had fallen from its vaunted perch in the zeitgeist as national heroes forging a more efficient, connected new future. But perhaps more importantly, it showed how we’d all been so critically duped: Tech leaders like Zuckerberg emerged out of the post-dot com bubble promising a hopeful new technocracy—and it didn’t take long for that promise to erode entirely. Facebook’s tagline of “it’s free and always will be” suddenly smacked of fatal irony, because we really were paying all along, just with our personal data instead of out of our wallets.