World Without Mind ― The Existential Threat of Big Tech

Bestselling author Franklin Foer delivers a blistering and personal polemic against today's monolithic technology companies, and the perilous ideas underpinning their megalomania

Over the past few decades, the world has rushed headlong into the arms of an all-encompassing machine embrace. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These corporations speak of making the world better, and there's no doubt their efficiency of has enabled an intoxicating level of daily convenience for many. Very little in our lives has not in some way been subject to this sudden algorithmic revolution. But that efficiency has not come without sacrifice. As the recent political events have demonstrated, the world is changing rapidly and unpredictably. In order to understand where our current path leads, we must understand the ideas that underpin these titanic companies. Technology is never ideologically neutral--least of all when it promises a utopian future. 

Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science--from the Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley--Foer puts the DNA of the very idea of "tech" under the microscope. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are not just trampling longstanding liberal values, but breaking laws intended protect intellectual property and privacy. Only a generation ago, their corporate ambitions would have been unimaginable: Google hopes to conquer death; Amazon provides cloud services to the CIA; Facebook mines us for data; Apple seeks to control everything we read, watch, and listen to. This is not the path towards freedom and prosperity, but the total automation and homogenization of our social, political, and intellectual lives. 

There have been monopolists in the past--the robber barons of the 19th century, for example--but they merely sought profit. Today's corporate giants hunt much bigger game. They want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our lives. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat, and even fewer still have understood the imperative of resistance. Taking no prisoners, Foer both indicts these companies, and shapes a path towards reining them in. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become.

Franklin Foer is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of How Soccer Explains the World, which has been translated into 27 languages and a winner of a National Jewish Book Award. For seven years, he edited The New Republic magazine.