How sweet it is. After a decade of speaking, writing, broadcasting, shouting, cajoling, and generally raising the alarm, I was thrilled this week to see the people finally – finally – push back against Big Tech.

I know that this election represents a sea change in multiple ways, but from my corner I see it as a referendum against the unethical, contemptible, murderous leadership in Silicon Valley. Remember the tech oligarchs standing beside the orange occupant at the inauguration in 2025? Big Tech leaders aligned themselves with his administration, his policies, and his corruption.

More than that, they used their alliance with the carrot-hued crime lord to push AI, unceasingly, into schools and workplaces, into surveillance devices, into data centers that blight the landscape and pollute the air and water.

What has Big Tech done with its unprecedented level of power, money, and influence? Did they cure cancer (as they promised), solve climate change (as they promised), shorten the workweek (as they promised)? Just the opposite: they spent their resources on growth at any cost – to protect their power – spewing pollution, wasting energy, and wrecking the economy. In the case of one trillionaire, he burned half a billion dollars in this election alone, in a failed attempt to hold back the tide of our discontent.

But he lost. We won.

Coincident with the election, a curious thing happened in pro sports, as the Milwaukee Brewers – a team with one of the smallest payrolls in the league – won the World Series. I don’t follow baseball, but this outcome seems to rhyme with Tuesday’s national rejection of the tech bros.

It makes you wonder.

Is it possible we’re entering into a new era in which money is not the sole driver for absolutely everything? Could it be possible for us to shift away from an economy dominated by money-worshipping forces like Big Tech and private equity?

Time will tell. But that vision is a good description of what I’ve been advocating for – through my radio show, my customer experience work, and the many years of the GEL conference. I’ve always been attracted to this concept of a “good experience,” an outcome that can arise when the goal is some higher value other than mere money or power. It can be hard to describe, but I like how the writer Robert Pirsig put it, calling it Quality: an undefined good that can only come about from care and love.

GEL itself spotlights “good experience,” or Quality, through the people, projects, and teams pursuing it in various forms. There were several good examples at last month’s GEL 2026 conference. I just posted the video of one of them: Eric Gullickson, president of Mohonk Mountain House, a family-owned resort located in the Catskill region of New York.

You can watch the video on the Gel site. (It’s also posted here.)

After a description of Mohonk itself, Eric discusses what motivates the leadership, and what values guide their decisionmaking. You’ll note, if you watch the video, a complete absence of Big Tech ideology. No “growth at any cost,” no monopoly strategy or regulatory capture, no exploitation of vulnerable communities, and so on. Instead what we see are these:

• Simplicity

• Peace

• Integrity

• Community

• Equality

• Stewardship

All Quaker-inspired values – Mohonk’s founders were Quakers – and in fact, as I stated above, the resort is still owned by the founding family. While Mohonk does need to earn money to stay in business, the pursuit of money and power is not the primary goal of the organization. Such a counter-cultural idea runs exactly opposite to the dominant thinking of Big Tech and their financial vassals.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, Tuesday’s election will inspire more organizations to adopt values like these. The path is open.

I’ll close with one other example, this one not from GEL but the Wall Street Journal. A few days before the election the Journal ran a profile of Gund Co., a St. Louis-based manufacturer that, like Mohonk, is led by people motivated by something other than growth at any cost.

The article – Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years (gift link, Oct 28, 2026) – explains that, like Mohonk, Gund is a family-owned corporation and holds true to dearly held values:

The sustainable way, [CEO] Steve Gund said, is building a business around a larger sense of mission, both for its workers and future generations of family owners.

“One of my life’s callings is to make sure that we get this message out: Business is not just about driving profitability for the shareholders, it is absolutely about taking care of people,” he [said].

I can only hope that people will see examples like Mohonk and Gund, pursue a better path, and reject the dead-end ideas of the oligarchs.

It’s a worthy cause. The fight ahead is Big Tech versus the rest of us, and we’re going to win.

For more reading:

• There Is No Place In A Functional Society For Elon Musk (by Albert Burneko in Defector, Nov 5, 2026): “Break up his companies. Strip their tax breaks, their contracts; force them to fire him from his executive positions. Tell your congresspeople! You must break Elon Musk.”

• Questioning of Elon Musk, under oath, should start here: Elon Musk is a National Security Risk (gift link, NYT) – by a retired army general two years ago.

• The Tech Industry Went All in on Trump, and Now They’re in Serious Danger Now That Americans Have Turned on Him (Futurism, Nov 4, 2026)

As always, if you’d like to support my work on the newsletter – as you are on a free subscription! – I hope you’ll join Creative Good. Thanks.

Until next time,

-mark

Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Founder and host, GEL conference

Email: [email protected]
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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