Which they promptly keep to themselves and utilize to maximally exploit their users time and attention. Technology is a tool, not a generic force for good. Tools are agnostic to human value. If technology is being used exploitatively then it's a problem.

They don't keep it all to themselves, giant technology companies have open sourced things like mapreduce, kubernetes, golang, react, kafka, and more.

How many years did it take for Google to release MapReduce?

I think that's overstating. To be sure some real tech challenges in distributing work horizontally, but I don't think it's created anywhere near the amount of value that's come out of e.g. space race research.

The tech is less visible and more boring but I'm doubtful that this is true:

> I don't think it's created anywhere near the amount of value that's come out of e.g. space race

The space race gave us a lot of tangible, physics/materials/hard-engineering related tech. Software gives us a lot of internet infrastructure, communications, algorithms, etc. that are incredibly useful for the average consumer. Lots of people in this thread complaining about the negative value of ads and such, but the communications infrastructure, knowledge sharing, social change due to marginalized people being able to communicate things far and wide ... there's a lot of intangible benefits that have come as a direct result of focusing heavily on consumer internet.

vastly overrated compared to focusing on actual tech.

You don’t think map reduce, tensorflow and the countless other systems that have been open sourced haven’t had huge impact outside of their original use cases at these companies?

This is a really solid question with no clear cut answer on the surface. I wonder what sort of research is being done here?

Distributed systems that, more or less, are only really needed to run similar social networks as Facebook or Google?

That’s like saying the Cook maybe fat and morbidly obese but look at how efficiently he consumes such a large number of calories every day.