World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

Computer scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for patterns: They talk about torturing the data until it confesses. Yet this metaphor contains unexamined implications. Data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear.

The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organizations that run the machines.

Perhaps Facebook no longer fully understands its own tangle of algorithms—the code, all sixty million lines of it, is a palimpsest, where engineers add layer upon layer of new commands. (This is hardly a condition unique to Facebook. The Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg cowrote an essay that argued, “We have, perhaps for the first time ever, built machines we do not understand. . . . At some deep level we don’t even really understand how they’re producing the behavior we observe. This is the essence of their incomprehensibility.”

But how do the engineers know which dial to twist and how hard? There’s a whole discipline, data science, to guide the writing and revision of algorithms.

Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. That’s always been a danger of the engineering mind-set, as it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and begins to design a more perfect social world. We are

THE GLOWING AMBITIONS OF FACEBOOK, Google, and Amazon—their sci-fi fantasies about everlasting life, their drones, their virtual realities—distract from the core basis for their dominance. These companies are our primary portals to information and knowledge. The tech monopolists take the bounty of the Internet, that decentralized mess of words and images, and turn it into something approachable and useful.

the knowledge monopoly.*

This is the strange essence of the new knowledge monopolies. They don’t actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it.

Take Monsanto, which produces the seeds that account for 80 percent of all corn and 90 percent of all soybeans grown in the United States. What Monsanto possesses, what it ferociously hoards, is the genetic traits of these seeds. Its comparative advantage isn’t factories, but laboratories.

If left to the devices of the market, the price of knowledge would quickly collapse, destroyed by the ease with which it could be freely copied. But the government doesn’t permit this collapse. One of its primary economic responsibilities is preserving the value of knowledge. It shelters the creators of knowledge from the rigors of the competitive marketplace, granting them a temporary state-sponsored monopoly in the form of patents and copyrights.

Knowledge is too important to remain the eternal possession of any company or individual.

Parliament-Funkadelic fame, was sued for sampling himself.) This

nostrum “Information wants to be free.” To charge for information was to walk away from a historic business opportunity.

David Foster Wallace called the condition Total Noise. With it, our reading became peripatetic, less focused.

Steve Jobs could have easily designed the iPod to make it inhospitable to stolen music. But he initially refused to build the iPod so that it would block unlicensed content. At the same time Jobs’s device enabled piracy, Jobs himself decried digital thievery. He was playing a cunning game: After helping push the music business to the brink, he would save it and come to dominate it. Eighteen months after creating the iPod, he debuted an online store, iTunes, that became the place where a vast percentage of all music was purchased. In the face of piracy, enfeebled producers lay prostrate in front of their new savior, even if Apple dismembered the once profitable album by selling individual songs for ninety-nine cents.

The journalist Robert Levine has written, “Google has as much interest in free online media as General Motors does in cheap gasoline. That’s why the company spends millions of dollars lobbying to weaken copyright.” Google and Facebook penalize companies that don’t share their vision of intellectual property.

Acela Corridor

That’s a quaint thesis, the idea that certain well-placed individuals, full of conscious and submerged biases, exert control over the flow of information.

But it’s also the truth. Some information comes to the fore, some of it recedes. Gatekeepers make those calls. Even if they self-consciously never quite consider their power, gatekeepers must believe that they know what their audience wants, and they must believe they know what’s best for their audience.

In its most noble moments, the Washington Post took down power, even as it cozied up to it. Phil’s widow and successor, Katharine, sipped terrapin soup with Henry Kissinger, at the same time her paper shredded his lies about Vietnam. She frequently found herself standing her ground in the face of presidents, who pleaded with her to silence her reporters in the name of national security.

Any organization that can take down a president is worth staring at with awe, but also fear. Look at the alleged machinations of Rupert Murdoch’s papers in London, acting on implicit deals that their owner reportedly cuts with politicians.

It was Lyndon Johnson who later ignited Graham’s imagination. The newspaper magnate even helped write the speech in which the Senate majority leader announced his presidential ambitions.

Amazon, by contrast, sells nearly every cultural artifact produced by Western civilization. But let’s not confuse Amazon with a utopian experiment in participatory democracy. Amazon always gives better treatment to some artifacts than others—promoting them in email, on its home page, and through its recommendation algorithms. This is tremendous cultural power, especially given how so many of Amazon’s competitors have melted in the face of its size and prowess.

Amazon has become the indispensable store. It sells 65 percent of all e-books and over 40 percent of all books. Publishing depends on Amazon for its health—an awkward, vulnerable position. At the same time publishers rely on Amazon, Amazon would like to destroy publishers, or at least severely curtail their influence. Amazon is both publishing’s primary outlet and its primary competition.

JEFF BEZOS HAS FAMOUSLY MANAGED to convince Wall Street that his retail operation doesn’t require short-term profits; that quarterly earnings are nothing, compared with the riches over the horizon that will arrive once Amazon cements its dominance. With such forbearance, he can afford to experiment, to probe publishing for points of weakness. Not all of Amazon’s many efforts to seize terrain from the publishers have worked. In 2011, Amazon set up an old-fashioned New York publishing house. It hired eminent editors, installed them in a high-rent office, and gave them a pile of money to acquire books. That business floundered when it paid large advances to buy celebrity memoirs (Penny Marshall, Billy Ray Cyrus) and literary fiction that flopped, even with all of the company’s might behind the effort. But that was a conventional effort, and Amazon is not a conventional company. It has succeeded by creating a new set of rules. Rather than working with established authors, it cultivates new ones. Or rather, it has built its own mass-market imprints, recruiting an army of genre writers, and it has encouraged frustrated lawyers and fed-up schoolteachers to self-publish their novels directly to the Kindle. Many of these writers have folders full of rejection letters that they have received from New York publishers. They are willing, for the most part, to work without receiving advance payments. So, Amazon incurs little or no financial risk in backing their work. It finds an audien...

Even if Bezos saves the paper, we shouldn’t applaud too loudly. The population of informational oligarchs shrinks a little more every year.

condition was itself unusually bountiful. “By the early twenty-first century, literally 99.9 percent of contemporary daily papers are a monopoly in their own cities,” the media critic Ben Bagdikian once tabulated. Since he did the math, a depressingly large percentage of those broadsheets have perished.

The consolidation of media also stemmed from government loosening its regulatory guard. There were limits to how much local power the Graham family could amass, at least until the George W. Bush administration. Before Republicans remade the rules, the FCC prohibited newspaper owners from acquiring a television station in the same market, and vice versa. This was the broad thrust of federal policy: When a merger looked to reduce the number of media outlets, no matter how marginally, the impulse was to reject it.

As Justice Byron White put it in 1969, “It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of broadcasters, which is paramount.” To protect these rights, the government forced Rupert Murdoch to sell the Boston Herald in 1994 before it would allow him to buy back the Fox affiliate in town. And it blocked the Graham family rival, Joe Allbritton, from owning both the Washington Star and a local television affiliate.

Old gatekeepers might not always have been worthy of praise, but at least there were a lot of them. And in that multiplicity there was the basis for democracy. In Amazon’s vision of the future, there’s just one gate. And while Jeff Bezos may wave everyone through, the health of the book business has already come to depend on the whims of one company. Even if he were a benevolent monopolist, that would be a terrifying prospect.

But the knowledge monopolists have unique power in our democracy. They don’t just have the ability to pick the fate of a book, they can influence the fate of the Republic. By sorting information, they make decisions that shape our opinions of issues and politicians. Even free-market conservatives will worry about concentrations of power among companies that control the flow of words and ideas, because that power has been so blatantly abused in the past—both the distant past and the not-so-distant past.

A sense of public duty didn’t loom large in the AP’s calculus in those years. The AP archives are filled with instances of Republican malfeasance that the organization had uncovered through tips and various other reportorial channels. But the men who ran the AP were rock-ribbed Republicans themselves. The AP chiefs, without a pang of self-consciousness or guilt, committed to burying any evidence of wrongdoing by the leaders of their party.

I watched as Amazon punished Hachette’s writers in its effort to make the publisher feel pain. Books, the products of years of passionate labor, were prevented from reaching the market. Amazon used its bully’s arm to delay their shipments or direct readers to older books on similar subjects, as well as a raft of other vengeful tactics. It’s

Courage doesn’t grow if one glances over at the Washington Post. Since Bezos bought it, the paper has hardly replicated the Times’ tough coverage. Bezos could have declared that he deserves the same treatment that the paper dishes out to the rest of the world. Instead, the paper tiptoes around him, which seems to be the way he likes it.

Marius Milner, an engineer at Google, abused his access to Google’s street-mapping vehicles. These cars traversed the roadways of America, taking pictures, which Google would stitch together into a coherent view. Milner programmed Google’s cars to tap the WiFi signals coming from the homes they passed, sweeping up private data, even email correspondence. Instead of cooperating with a government investigation, Google “deliberately impeded and delayed,” earning a fine from the Federal Communications Commission in the process. Indeed, the company refrained from firing Milner. The case hardly builds confidence in Google’s commitment to transparency or in its safeguards against abuse.

The failure to internalize—or perhaps even comprehend—the meaning of their own rhetoric about transparency is characteristic. American democracy was built on richly deserved fear, an anxiety that power might pool in one institution at everyone else’s expense. The tech companies have no such fear. The more they can insinuate themselves into our lives the better. There is no limit. Of course, it’s not their job to worry about their power. That anxiety falls to the rest of us, and we should be far clearer about the problem: Companies that are indifferent to democracy have acquired an outsized role in it.

With every item it posted, Upworthy would write twenty-five different headlines. Software allowed Upworthy to automatically publish all twenty-five, and then determine the most clickable of the bunch. Based on these results, Upworthy uncovered syntactical patterns that were close to sure hits.

“The pull of dollars towards sensationalism helped move newspapers away from the political parties,” the media historian Michael Schudson writes.

The essential text of the era was Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News, which he published in 1920. As an ambitious young editor at the New Republic, Lippmann had supported the Great War, but the public’s response to the conflict horrified him. He never expected the surge of raw, ugly xenophobia that followed Wilson’s call to arms.

It was a “reign of terror” fed by a “hurricane of demagogy.” The sheer ignorance of the public horrified him, and he pinned blame on the press. “In an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.” Modern life had grown dizzying. Propaganda and distortion stood in the way of the average citizen’s search for truth.

Robert Darnton, who wrote for the Times in the sixties, has recalled, “We really wrote for one another. . . . We knew that no one would jump on our stories as quickly as our colleagues; for reporters make the most voracious readers, and they have to win their status anew each day as they expose themselves before their peers in print.”

Over the course of a decade, journalism shed $1.6 billion worth of reporter and editor salaries. At the same time that journalism shriveled, its prestige collapsed. One survey ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job in America, edging out lumberjack and parole officer.

The Washington Post (and after I left, the New Republic) installed giant television screens that display traffic stats to the staff. Jonah Peretti boasted, “A lot of what we do at BuzzFeed is give dashboards to every person who works at BuzzFeed where they’re seeing how people are engaging with the content they’re producing: Is it going up? Is it going down?”

But these companies don’t try to insulate themselves from the pressures of the market. Their pursuit of audience—winning the popularity contest of the Web—is central to their mission. They have allowed the endless feedback loop of the Web—the never-ending flood of data—to shape their editorial sensibility, to determine their editorial investments.

The problem isn’t just the media’s dependence on Silicon Valley companies. It’s the dependence on Silicon Valley values. Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism. Reporters

Once journalists come to know what works, which stories yield traffic, they will pursue what works. This is the definition of pandering and it has horrific consequences. Donald Trump is the culmination of the era. He

For years, media pumped Trump’s theories about President Obama’s foreign birth into circulation, even though they were built on dunes of crap. It gave endless attention to his initial smears of immigrants, even though media surely understood how those provocations stoked an atmosphere of paranoia and hate. Once Trump became a plausible candidate, media had no choice but to cover him. But media had carried him to that point. Stories about Trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the Gods of Data and benefited the bottom line. Trump began as Cecil the Lion, and then ended up president of the United States.

Now assignments are subjected to a cost-benefit analysis—will the article earn enough traffic to justify the investment? This analysis is sometimes explicit and conscious, though often it’s subconscious and embedded in euphemism. It’s the train of thought that leads editors to declare an idea “not worth the effort” or to worry about how an article will “sink.”

The first breach in the barricade is something called “branded content” or “native advertising.” These ads intend to solve the problem of Web advertising—all those banners atop Web pages have become highly ignorable din, ineffective means of branding a firm. Web banner ads physically sit on the fringes of editorial. Branded content is meant to be integrated into the very fabric of a Web site. It is an ad that is written to resemble journalism—a pseudo-piece about the new scientific consensus suggesting better ways to quit smoking in Time, or a sham article on the emerging workforce in the New York Times. Indeed, the ads are usually produced by the media companies themselves, not an ad agency. (The media companies often claim their staff of writers and editors have nothing to do with the copy, though typically it’s their stable of freelancers who do the dirty work.)

Advertisers are no longer simply buying real estate to sell their products; they are acting as sort of beneficent patrons of journalism. Here we can see the stirrings of something far worse. It has become commonplace for journalistic organizations to recruit corporations and foundations as launch sponsors. Advertisers bankroll the debut of new journalistic products. One reason that an advertiser might play this role is perfectly harmless—it’s good exposure. But there’s another, more pernicious reason that they pay—the advertiser gets to play an opaque role in shaping the editorial product.