Early in Google's history, an executive suggested that the firm adopt the slogan "Don't Be Evil." It was more than a motto; it was a mission statement for the new "masters of the universe", as Tom Wolfe described Wall Street over a decade earlier – a group of geeks stationed 3,000 miles away from New York's corporate excess and malfeasance.

Jeff Bezos defends Amazon after NYT exposé of working practices

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Tech's take on capitalism was informed more by 1960s counterculture and the hippies who gathered a few miles north of Silicon Valley at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Contrary to Gordon Gekko's infamous 1980s mantra, for web companies catapulted from California garages to the New York Stock Exchange, greed wasn't "good" – and it definitely wasn't cool.

But as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have become some of the world's richest and most powerful companies, their well-intentioned capitalism has begun to resemble the ruthless corporatism more commonly associated with giant banks, insurance firms, and energy companies.

This colder, meaner Silicon Valley is on display in a front page article of Sunday's New York Times about the intensely high demands placed on Amazon's workforce by CEO Jeff Bezos. As the e-commerce giant continues its ambitious play to sell everything to everyone all the time, current and former employees bemoan long working hours and an expectation that workers be available 24 hours a day to answer emails.

Staffers are encouraged to send negative feedback to management calling out behavior that's below the company's impossibly high standards. And pity employees who suffer a miscarriage or cancer diagnosis, as they are said to find little sympathy from bosses or colleagues.

Bezos responded to these claims in an internal memo obtained by GeekWire, writing that the article "doesn't describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day".

But another tech bubble has burst. The idea of tech employees slaving away miserably runs counter to the image of Silicon Valley propagated by pop culture and the companies themselves, in which workers inhabit utopian workplaces, are fed by gourmet chefs, and spar over ping pong tables and classic arcade machines in recognition of the relationship between play and creativity. Sure, tech employees work as hard as they play. They do, however, in order to happily share in the glory (and profits) of their corporate overlords – or so this narrative suggests.