Okay, so the FB commenter got me. “From a profiling standpoint, I'm hung up on why Friends of Lippert are so particularly fascinated with whores, junk, murder, sex, betrayal, yachting & a last sip of wine before heading into the wind. Tough demographic, man!” he said. He was referring to a link I posted on my Facebook page to a viral story so overflowing with made-for-tabloid details that the fascination is not hard to imagine from any demographic. In a nutshell, the news involves the arrest of a prostitute (a.k.a. “sex worker”) in connection with the death of a Google executive from a heroin overdose after a late-night assignation on his yacht, the Escape. Security footage reportedly reveals that while he was on the floor, struggling for his life, she allegedly collected her needles, took a final sip of wine, lowered the shade on the boat’s window, and left. His body was found the next morning. The companion is named Ms. Tichelman (you can’t make that up) and the Google Glass guy allegedly found her on SeekingArrangement.com, a place for “sugar babies” and “sugar daddies." Details like these provide unimaginable gifts for crime writers everywhere, and instantly catapult the narrative into the perfect 5.0 version of a Raymond Chandler novel, or a film noir for the digital age. Obviously, similar scandals have long captured the public imagination and sold papers. The death of architect Stanford White in 1907 comes to mind. But in this case, I think the Google factor is significant. It makes the story an emblem of our times. Because at this point, aren’t we all developing a bit of Googlefreude? After all, wasn’t the digital revolution going to make our lives collectively more awesome? Hadn’t we been led to believe that techies are more exalted types, who do different things with their money, and wouldn’t end up in the same tawdry sex and drug scandals as sleazy politicians and the ethics-free Wolves of Wall Street? And that technology would also reinvent the world and save humanity? Everything has a cycle. And right now, on the low end, we’re sick of Honey Boo-Boo, the Kardashians, and Duck Dynasty, for starters. And in light of recent revelations, we’re a little tired of the tarnished gods of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, too. The FCC is investigating Facebook’s big, bad, secret news feed manipulation; regardless, the below-board m.o. angered millions of users who are already annoyed by every change the social media monolith makes. (And many women who can’t arrange to get home to their families at 5:30 every night are not great fans of "Lean In,"COO Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller on female corporate success, or her move to “ban bossy.” ) We have long heard about the low pay and serf-like working conditions for employees at Amazon fulfillment centers, which are pretty shocking. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has managed to position himself as the modern male version of the Wicked Witch of the West, sending his drones out liked winged monkeys and attacking venerable brick-and-mortar publishing companies. Stephen Colbert has mustered his own army, directing his viewers to boycott Amazon and use smaller online booksellers. Bezos would be smart to listen. Of course, the general arrogance of tech world plutocrats is proving no different from the way banking, Wall Street, or steel, oil, and/or railroad moguls have always operated historically. Moguls are generally killer competitors, who don’t like to let the law get in their way. Except at least the Robber Barons gave us some exquisite public libraries. Whereas this 30-year-old tech revolution thing has become a winner-take-all, ask-permission-later game that has been great for the 2 or 3 percent, but has also entirely flattened the middle class. As Jaron Lanier, “the father of virtual reality,” writes in his latest book, “Who Owns the Future?”: “The old ideas about information being free in the information age ended up screwing over everybody except the owners of the very biggest computers.” He adds: “The biggest computers turned into spying and behavior modification operations, which concentrated wealth and power.” Lanier’s most-talked-about example involves Kodak versus Instagram. “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera,” he writes in the prelude. “But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?” Disruption was always the aim. And Silicon Valley-ites go ballistic hearing this, and offer a million counter-examples. In one review I read, the guy asked, “What about eBay? How many people were actually employed by Christie’s auction house, vs. making money on eBay?” Well, I think that sort of proves Lanier’s point. Yes, you can make real money as a seller on eBay -- but few do. Most make the kind of money that requires two other additional jobs if you’re going to make your rent, never mind securing membership into the middle class. And I realize that one sex scandal, involving a victim who had his own demons to battle -- and who apparently started out in automotive and had only worked at Google for a brief time -- is just one sad story and can’t be emblematic of much, except that human nature doesn’t change over the ages. But in a larger cultural way, Googlefreude, and backlash against technocrats, is very real. As a country, we cannot continue without a middle class. And we have to start working on the revisions. But excuse me for now. I have to get back to posting about the results of taking the BuzzFeed quiz, “Which ‘Grease’ Pink Lady Are You?” Wouldn’t you like to know?