The weird criticism that Big Tech is too digital

Google and Facebook haven't built flying cars — and that's okay

A flying car.
(Image credit: Illustrated | The Advertising Archives / Alamy Stock Photo, RoschetzkyIstockPhoto/iStock, Aerial3/iStock)

At the start of this decade, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel famously decried America's persistent lack of technological progress. "What happened to the future?" he wondered. "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters," he lamented, neatly encapsulating the sense of underwhelming tech achievement.

Now at decade's end, Twitter offers twice as many characters but little else seems to have changed despite all the attention given to Silicon Valley's high-flying "unicorn" startups. Forget about flying cars dotting the skies of Manhattan. Even the dream of safer cars roaming highways right here on the ground — autonomously driven by supersmart software — now seems like an overhyped fantasy. What's the Next Big Thing coming from Big Tech, a fourth iPhone camera? A new algorithm to better serve targeted ads on social media? Tweets with, wait for it, 420 characters?

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James Pethokoukis

James Pethokoukis is the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he runs the AEIdeas blog. He has also written for The New York Times, National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and other places.