Tech has nothing left to sell us

Because they've run out of us to sell.

There’s a movie scene I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s from the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, an enjoyably fluffy film centered around a cache of gold stolen from a Venetian villa. As the heist crew celebrates their successful theft, one member—played by a sleazed-up Edward Norton—turns traitor, staging a brutal ambush on his compatriots, leaving them for dead and absconding with the loot for himself.

Later, the crew, having survived the attack, spy on Norton’s character in the mansion he purchased with their money while hatching a plot to steal it back from him. Where the other crew members had expressed big and interesting dreams for their share of the loot, their betrayer surprises them with his lack of creativity in spending it.

"What does a man with thirty-five million dollars worth of gold do at night?”, Seth Green’s hacker character laments. “He watches his big-ass TV.”

Listening to the titans of Silicon Valley breathlessly express their latest visions for the futur…