World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

Data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear.

By collapsing the value of knowledge, they have diminished the quality of it.

“What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

The poverty of attention, the inability to hold a reader’s attention for sustained time, that’s the crucial concept. It’s an existential problem for producers of knowledge—and a source of strain and confusion for consumers of it.

But the knowledge monopolists have unique power in our democracy.

This was ironic because it came shortly after his describing the necessity of editors

Journalism was vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the justification for such fanaticism about building a thick, tall wall between the two. The fear was that we’d enter a world where readers couldn’t tell the difference between editorial and advertising—where the corrupt hand of advertisers would interfere with the journalistic search for truth. Those fears are in the process of being realized.

The Cycle. Each new information technology follows the same trajectory: “From somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel.” History hasn’t perfectly repeated itself, but we’ve reached the hardened end of Wu’s cycle.

Without the private space to think freely, the mind deadens—and then so does the Republic. Brandeis wrote, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”

Instead of using its strength to strangle Google in its cradle, which was well within its power, it watched the upstart from a careful distance for fear of getting slapped by the government.

Re: Microsoft. Is this true? I haven’t heard this before. I always heard the narrative that Microsoft basically just failed here.

While they were still students at Stanford, they wrote a paper arguing, “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.” It was such a worrying concern that they even doubted whether a trustworthy search engine could ever thrive in the marketplace. “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.” They discarded their own wisdom long ago.

Paid ads are in a system than organic search. Am I missing something or is he missing something?

Consumers have no inherent problem paying for words, so long as publishers place a price tag on them.

Not sure if this is true now

Amazon tracks every movement across its e-books. It uses the data it gleans from Kindles to predict the commercial efficacy of the books it sells. It tracks the passages that we underline—and shares those markings with our fellow readers.

WHO TOLD YOU THAT