The November issue of Harper's is not available online but

[Lydia Leftcoast]

it contains two articles worth reading.

One is about the Silicon Valley libertarians as ideological descendants of the Southern Pacific Railroad tycoons of the nineteenth century.

The other is about seniors who can't afford to retire (some have only $500 or less in monthly SS), who live in RVs, and travel the country doing temp work for amusement parks and for large companies like Amazon.

[bemildred]

1. Yes, the article on Stanford and the railroad barons and their modern imitators is good work. nt

[hedda_foil]

2. It's online, just not easily found. Here it is.

http://harpers.org/archive/2013/11/

Sorry ... I posted too soon. Some articles are behind a paywall. But could you check this table of contents at the link above might help narrow it down. This article sounds like what you're describing but it's from the August 2014 issue.

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/08/the-octopus-and-its-grandchildren/
Which is behind the wall.

[MisterP]

3. Richard Barbrook called it the "Californian ideology"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

Timothy Draper, Jimmy Wales, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Guy Kawasaki--regardless of politics they have a pretty messianic view of technology (I remember George Glider saying we don't need to worry about ozone because by 1997 we'll all be living inside the computers) and think that because they made money in one field they can speechify in all the others

Elon Musk lied about CAHSR, promised a no-cost, lightning-fast, and 100% crash-proof: turns out he'd told us to drop everything and tear up the tracks for a cocktail-napkin scrawl (well, CGI) for something that's gone nowhere since the 1860s

[adirondacker]

4. Interesting. I assumed as much, but hadn't heard of the term. Thanks for posting. nt

[KoKo]

5. Thank you Lydia......!