Are techies the new villians?

After the crash of 2008, bankers became villains in the popular imagination. Goldman Sachs became a dirty word; the investment banker was famously called a "vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," by Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. Taibbi would go on to write about Jeffrey Verschleiser, another Goldman Sachs employee who played a large role in the implosion of Bear Sterns, his previous employer. Verschleiser hired out all 94 rooms of a posh Colorado hotel to celebrate the bar-mitzvah of his daughter in extravagant style. Bankers behaving badly led to the wave of Occupy movements and gave birth to the term 'one percenter.'

Now, it looks like tech millionaires may be replacing investment bankers as villains in the public mind. The difference between the two? Investment bankers know that the public hates them, writes Noreen Malone at the New Republic. "' My friends in finance are all very cynical... We're the ones everyone hates. They're fine with taking the paycheck' (says Valleywag's Sam Biddle). But tech founders tend to think that they're saving the world in addition to getting wealthy, an attitude that can rub white-collar grunts the wrong way. Even the language - no one simply sells a product, they 'disrupt' - is part of that," she writes.

Another factor affecting the way techies are perceived has to do with the availability of easy money for tech projects and startups. The app economy ensures that companies making apps of questionable value get a lot of funding. Non-tech startups, however, have to struggle to get investors and angels.

In some ways, the backlash was inevitable, writes Malone. Tech companies have become victims of their own success.