About a year ago I was in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, gazing down at the Golden Gate Bridge from one of Larry Ellison’s many spectacular homes. The Oracle chief executive wasn’t there – he had lent the house out for a reception. In any case, he would be the last person to apologise for enjoying the fruits of his success. But the view from technology executives’ balconies is getting stormier. After banks and bankers, could they be next to feel the sting of a populist backlash?

It sounds unlikely. For the tablet-toting, smartphone-stroking, Amazon-and-Googling masses – you and me, in other words – to attack companies that provide the products and services we love would be a case of biting the data feed they hand us.

But consider these rumbles: politicians on both sides of the Atlantic attack Apple, Google and Amazon for their tax arrangements; commentators take Silicon Valley’s wealthy to task for the growing economic inequality in northern California; activists worry about ill-protected privacy, dirt-cheap labour and energy-inefficient server farms; antitrust regulators circle closer.