I have a hard time trusting technology companies. That doesn’t mean, mind you, that I trust Congress. It’s just that we’re conditioned to distrust the people we inevitably elect. Tech firms, by contrast, are more often the objects of our praise and wonder. They’re supposed to be on our side. But the difference between the rhetoric of tech giants and its supporters as both protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, has introduced a nuance that calls that praise into question.

Big internet is concerned that the bill’s creators don’t understand the “architecture of the internet” enough to anticipate the implications of the legislation. People like you and me, who use Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on, have begun to paint SOPA in the image of young versus old. Between us of the Internet Generation, and them, the other who cannot, for the life of them figure out how to “get on the Facebook.” It’s our generation that re-framed SOPA as the Stupid Old People Act.

That discursive split between tech giants and the Internet Generation is not so much about corporate politeness as it is indicative of an ominous dichotomy between the two. Tech giants aren’t really against the aged — they’re opposed to those who don’t understand their craft getting in the way of it.

It is we (who put the “us” in “users”) who are including ourselves among those in league with tech giants. Some of us are accomplishing this by way of explicit technopeagentry, whereupon we brand ourselves with gadgets. Some of us are trying to learn the levers of the platforms we adore. In this latter group, over 300,000 people in the first seven days of the New Year signed up for the start-up CodeAcademy’s computer programming lessons. If these companies are the architects of the internet, I’m afraid there’s a cult of exclusivity growing among those who hold the blueprints.

Take Google. While they’ve done their part to index and open the internet as a searchable reference, the company is famous for a strong insider-outsider culture. Ex-Google engineer Douwe Osinga wrote last year that internally, most information is open-access. When you leave, though, it’s a bit like leaving a “walled garden.”

Another undercovered story in the tech world this week peered into the elusive world of Apple through the eyes of Fortune Magazine editor Adam Lashinsky. He compares the company to a terrorist cell for the way it operates on a need-to-know basis. Among other leaks, he writes that Apple holds secret meetings, locks are frequently changed, windows are painted over in black and undercover company spies stake out in nearby bars to sniff out loose lips.

I’m as opposed to SOPA and PIPA as the next Facebook worm or Twitter twit, but I think there’s reason to pause when any powerful group begins to cloister itself. Tech giants are on our side today because we’re a mobile base of political support. The trouble here is that I don’t know what to do to push back when their interests and our interests are no longer the same.

For example, Google’s secrecy takes a turn for the awkward when you learn that Google and the CIA jointly funded a firm that believes it can predict the future, or that Google has built and sold to the national intelligence agencies the infrastructure they use for indexing information. This makes you wonder who Google’s “don’t be evil” motto is directed toward.

Since the beginning of the new year, Facebook has been demoing a new development that brings advertising into the main newsfeed section as “Sponsored Stories” — as if the advertisements were coming from our friends. As with all previous changes, Zuckerberg and Co. got a lot of heat for the implement. But just like all other the other changes Facebook makes, it’s probably here to stay.

What do you do when the user becomes the used?

You can electronically mail your correspondence to RAJIV NARAYAN at rrnarayan@ucdavis.edu

It’s a tough time to be young and hungry.

Youth employment numbers are historically bad. National student loan debt is somewhere north of the $1 trillion mark. And to top it off, a boomer-controlled federal government is racking up trillions of dollars of debt that they expect young Americans to pay for.

In the dirty world of big-money politics, the young are prime targets for exploitation. Absorbed in their technological fantasy land or perhaps just unaware, the millennial generation seems wholly unprepared for the crushing burdens prepared for them by cynical or delusional politicians. But aware or not, young people will inherit a hopelessly broken economy and a bankrupt government. The blame lies with our leaders, and no leader is more responsible than our current president.

As I write this, the U.S. National Debt is $15,262,027,000,000 (or close to it; the debt goes up so fast that I can’t catch the last six digits). Worse still, the unfunded liabilities of the federal government, including Social Security, Medicare and the prescription drug benefit, are at a staggering $117 trillion and rising.

Since the national government is taking in a trillion dollars less per year than it is spending, the debt will continue to grow — at least until creditors suspect the obvious and call in their debts. At some point, the federal government won’t be able to sustain its programs. And with debt exceeding national GDP, increasing taxes won’t solve the problem. Young people have to face the reality that the great social programs that their parents enjoy — Social Security and Medicare, especially — will no longer be possible. It’s a type of reverse age discrimination: Boomers resist reform and keep the welfare state limping along long enough to fund their retirement, thus ensuring that later generations get all of the costs and none of the benefits. Hello Darwin, goodbye safety net.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was an undergrad slogging through midterms when I first felt the hope and change sweeping through campus. Candidate Obama was young, hip and educated, a perfect antidote to the familiarly leathery hacks he opposed in the primary and general elections. He performed earth-shaking miracles in the world of politics, not the least of which was convincing young hipsters to forsake their studied nonchalance and join the movement for Real Change.

In 2007, when President Bush asked Congress for yet another debt ceiling increase, Senator Obama protested vigorously, noting “the fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure… a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies.”

This guy is special, I thought.

Aristotle once said, “Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.” Fast forward three years since President Obama’s election and the world hasn’t changed — not for the better, at least. In fact, it’s gotten worse. When Obama took office the national debt was an already unmanageable $10.626 trillion dollars. “Change we can believe in” quickly became “more of the same,” and the debt has spiraled to over $15 trillion. And while Obama schizophrenically calls for reduced debt and increased spending (“investments”), the debt only goes in one direction. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the government spent $3.6 trillion and took in $2.3 trillion.

For many, the mind-boggling numbers are just another confirmation that the future isn’t as bright as it once was. As if the burden of crushing personal debt and joblessness after college weren’t enough, politicians desperate to shore up the failing welfare state are borrowing incomprehensible amounts of money against the human capital of the youngest generations.

Not surprisingly, President Obama is now himself asking Congress again to increase the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. Perhaps he could profit from his own words offered during the 2007 debt ceiling debate: “Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

Americans do deserve better. Unfortunately for the younger generation, it’s only likely to get worse.

SAM HOEL is a law student at UC Davis School of Law and can be reached at swhoel@ucdavis.edu.