In the 1980s, when I first began to suspect an out-of-control, technologically dependent world was emerging in every phase of human life, I started writing a novel with the tentative title “Plantation America.” It was my therapy novel, one that I returned to periodically but never seriously intended to be published. It was a way of coping with my instinctive aversion to an overly complex, ever-changing world that demanded more and still more time than what is allotted to each of us on this small spinning rock known as planet Earth.

As the years passed, one of my growing concerns was that big tech, despite its denials, seemed to have done more than its share to push a broader spectrum of workers, especially lower-income earners, out of their jobs.

The homeless shelters I read about in my region’s newspapers almost unanimously identify “economics” as the most prevalent reason for our burgeoning homeless populations. Recent statistics compiled by the Congressional Record Office reveal that “income disparities are now so pronounced that America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 104 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent in 2020.”

Other studies have revealed that the income disparities of our time are equal to, or exceed the extravagances of the Gilded Age during the last half of the nineteenth century. The same is true for the 1920s before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The major difference is that modern technology today has enabled powerful........

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