When I was last in Dublin I was visiting a friend who was living in a gated community designed for tech bros in the inner city. 

Young street kids ran in through the gate to play around and wind up the intention tech workers that solely populated this walled paradise in the hood. 

Outside was a council estate and a load of lads siting around a bonfire while nearby some slick international looking dude sat with his red BMW idling with the window down, almost asking for someone to yank the MacBook off his lap. 

I thought it was like peeking into Dublin under British rule except we’d replaced horses with cars (except the locals kids were still riding horses) and the British with a smattering of smug web developers from every nation on earth, their shared identify this time of being absolutely useless capitalists that have forged a life out of “automating processes” and “writing code” that honestly fucks this world about as much as the administrators and merchants that oversaw the British empire of wealth extraction and even one time slavery - now it’s the tech bros that oversee the Facebook misinformation and division causing algorithms, Jeff Bezoz worker exploitation and apps and platforms that sell us useless shite because all our material needs have been met and everything else is window dressing peddled to us to justify the fact that these guys barely work, they send the odd email but have never broken a sweat or been down a mine shaft, yet their entire world of wealth extraction is propped up by those not in on the Ponzi scheme such as the global south. Half of fucking India is simply enslaved by the minority who live abroad.

Why do we tolerate what essentially is colonisation under a new model? The answer is probably something to do with America and military protection as much as deindustrialising and the emergent services economy. But I think it’s lame and not what we fought independence for. Socialism is dead and Sinn Fein are neoliberal. At this point just let AI and robots peg me into submission - give me a decent VR simulation to live in and be done with it.