It's funny, this article seems to be rather full of irony. At the beginning of the article, I started miss when a lot of the tech scene was a little more grass roots, but maybe that's just rose colored glasses. Obviously, things have gotten more sophisticated since the days of simple computers like the TRS-80 and while it's not possible to totally grep everything in a modern OS, I do miss some of the hacker ethos that may have waned when the web went big. That being said, I find it a rather perverse juxtaposition to take about governments and Wall Street abusing the tech industry and then hold up he examples of Uber and bitcoin as movements counter to this. While there may have been some inefficiency in the Taxi medallion system, Uber seems to thrive on skirting labor laws and relying on the perhaps misplaced hype surround the "gig economy." Bitcoin is also not a terribly appropriate choice; while the idea of the blockchain is novel, the technology is kind of wasteful (all of energy required to move the blockchain along, probably coming from non-renewables), it's built on arguably shaky financial grounds (nothing like a sovereign to back it, it's often theorized to be a Ponzi scheme), and Wall Street is getting into it big time. Both of these seem to be part of the "pop tech" the author is rallying against.
I would rather see kids encouraged to hack all things (not just web sites and walled garden mobile app) to keep the old school tech culture alive, and I certainly feel the need to make sure things like GNU continue, as it, amongst other things, have provided the means to rally against big corporations controlling access to the interesting bits of technology (like being priced out) back in the day. I personally feel as though copyleft is important from this perspective, though this is probably a somewhat controversial opinion. One thing the author doesn't mention as something we should focus on, is if we want to keep the tech industry from locking us out of technology as we know it, I think we should also work to make sure tech giants and other corporations don't strong arm standards organizations and force development into walled non-free gardens, especially like with Google and Apple's threatening moves with regards to the internet (i.e. iOS locking out competing browsers, Google trying to completely lock out others from gTLDs like .dev).
EDIT: Just to be clear, I also find the equating of "pretty people" and the use of "nerd" around a lot of the culture surrounding technology both click-baity and ad hominem.