World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

Amazon, as in the most voluminous river on the planet, has a logo that points from A to Z; Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities.

Amazon was once content being “the everything store,” but now produces television shows, designs drones, and powers the cloud. The most ambitious tech companies—throw Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple into the mix—are in a race to become our “personal assistant.”

There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, which isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.

The big tech companies—the Europeans have charmingly, and correctly, lumped them together as GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon)—are shredding the principles that protect individuality.

will—the tech companies have a different way. They hope to automate the choices, both large and small, that we make as we float through the day. It’s their algorithms that suggest the news we read, the goods we buy, the path we travel, the friends we invite into our circle.

The revolution in cuisine wasn’t just enthralling. It was transformational. New products embedded themselves deeply in everyday life, so much so that it took decades for us to understand the price we paid for their convenience, efficiency, and abundance.

These foods were feats of engineering all right—but they were engineered to make us fat. Their delectable taste required massive quantities of sodium and sizable stockpiles of lipids, which happened to reset our pallets and made it harder to sate hunger.

It took vast new quantities of meat and corn to fabricate these dishes, a spike in demand that re-created the very essence of American agriculture and exacted a terrible environmental toll. A whole new system of industrial farming emerged, with penny-conscious conglomerates crammi...

Something like the midcentury food revolution is now reordering the production and consumption of knowledge. Our intellectual habits are being scrambled by the dominant firms. Just as Nabisco and Kraft wanted to change how we eat and what we eat, Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read.

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils.

Monopoly is the danger that a powerful firm will use its dominance to squash the diversity of competition.

Conformism is the danger that one of those monopolistic firms, intentionally or inadvertently, will use its dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization...

Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news through social media, and most of it via Facebook; a third of all traffic to media sites flows from Google.

Facebook and Google have created a world where the old boundaries between fact and falsehood have eroded, where misinformation spreads virally.

The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted.

Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it.

Then along came the new giants of tech. Silicon Valley’s biggest companies don’t merely crave monopoly as a matter of profit; its pundits and theorists don’t merely tolerate gigantism as a fact of economic life. In the great office parks south of San Francisco, monopoly is a spiritual yearning, a concept unabashedly embraced. Big tech considers the concentration of power in its companies—in the networks they control—an urgent social good, the precursor to global harmony, a necessary condition for undoing the alienation of humankind.

Silicon Valley’s craving for monopoly stretches back, strangely enough, to the counterculture of the 1960s, where it emerged from the most lyrical of visions of peace and love. More specifically, it begins with a crown prince of hippiedom.

Like so many white men before him, Brand found authenticity on the reservation that felt painfully absent in his own life.

In the hands of Facebook and Google, Brand’s vision is a pretext for domination.

After boarding at Exeter and graduating from Stanford, Brand enlisted in the army. His experience in the barracks ended unhappily, but it also supplied him with a measure of organizational acumen and managerial chops.

When Brand later looked back on the sixties, he recalled, “Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control.”

Paul Ceruzzi, a careful, nonideological historian of technology, has bracingly described the era: “U.S. computing from 1945 through the 1970s was dominated by large, centralized systems under tight controls, and these were not at odds with the Soviet political system.”

The machines, in fact, looked perfectly malevolent. Until the 1970s, most computers were massive, immovable blocks, like the behemoth institutions that used them. Whole rooms were required to house these early models. Because these instruments were so expensive and delicate, they were guarded vigilantly.

Why weren’t the buildings in front of him arrayed in perfectly parallel lines? Damn, must be the curvature of the Earth. Definitely, the curvature of the Earth. Hmmmm, you know, with all those satellites staring down on the planet, why isn’t there a photograph of the Earth? Not just a photograph, but a color photograph. Not just the Earth, but the WHOLE Earth.

His truck never quite took off, but the core concept morphed into something much bigger and more resonant. He created the Whole Earth Catalog, which was really more like an entirely new literary genre—or what Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation.”

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Technology, he argued, had created the ills of the world. Only technology could solve them. Tools, liberated from the hands of the monopolists and militarists, could empower individuals to become more self-sufficient and more self-expressive. Power Tools to the People, you could say.

If some of these sentiments sound familiar, it is because they have echoed in dozens of Apple commercials over the years.

In a way, this was a theory of radical individualism and self-reliance—a forerunner of Silicon Valley libertarianism. But Brand had studied the works of such thinkers as Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan. All of his intellectual h...

The Whole Earth Catalog is a foundational text of Silicon Valley—which helps account for the culture of the place. Despite the venture capitalists and the Teslas, Silicon Valley remains infused with the trace residue of the commune.

As Fred Turner has written in his important book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, “[The catalog] helped create the conditions under which microcomputers and computer networks could be imagined as tools of liberation.”

Innovations don’t magically appear or simply proceed on the basis of some scientific logic; the culture prods them into existence.

The Whole Earth Catalog transposed the values of the counterculture into technology.

It is an important fact of technological history that the outskirts of San Francisco were the national epicenter of both psychedelics and computing. Because of that geographical confluence, young engineers were unusually open to Stewart Brand’s message.

Two years later, when he grew this article into a book, he injected an important new phrase into the lexicon: “the personal computer.”

IT DOESN’T BODE WELL for the world that the lineage of the tech companies stretches back to the communes. That experiment ended in shambles—the communities dissolved into cults of personality, small villages riven by rivalries. All the gorgeous visions of democracy and collectivism culminated in authoritarianism and crushing disappointment. In 1971, Stewart Brand pulled the plug on the Whole Earth Catalog after four years of publication.

His concerns were far more spiritual. What he still craved was the sensation of wholeness—the profound belonging and authenticity he associated with the reservations and communes. They didn’t harbor a shred of alienation. They were at one with humanity. It was the same craving he felt when contemplating that missing photograph of Earth. This thinking was the exact opposite of Ayn Rand’s vision of libertarianism; a hunger for cooperation, sharing, and a self-conscious awareness of our place in a larger system.

“Ever since there were two organisms, life has been a matter of coevolution, life growing ever more richly on life. . . . We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that’s our only choice.”

“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”

McLuhan hinted that this network had the potential to wrap like a magical bandage around the world, closing its wounds without any trace of a scar. The fragmentation of humanity was an understandable concern for a generation born in the shadow of a total war and living under the constant threat of a nuclear conflagration.

The healing powers of the network could be found in McLuhan’s famous maxim: The medium is the message.

The perfect technology would revive the spirit of that bygone culture, but on a planetary scale, transforming the world into one big, happy tribe. Or, it would become a “global village,” to use his other cliché-destined phrase—and the warmth of that village would counteract destructive individualism and all the other fragmentary forces in the world.

There is a theory of knowledge embedded in this celebration of sharing: the notion that individuals can achieve only a limited understanding of the world while reading and thinking at their own desks.

But now, information can be sorted and processed by a much larger community—that could correct mistakes, add insights, and revise conclusions. Technology enabled what H. G. Wells once called the World Brain, or what Wired editor Kevin Kelly called the hive mind.

The assumption that undergirds this strain of technological thinking is that humans aren’t simply self-interested economic creatures. Linus Torvalds, the engineer who created Linux, argued, “Money is not the greatest of motivators. It’s been well establish...

BUT THERE WAS TENSION in the dream. Contradictions that wouldn’t easily melt away. On the one hand, the technologists aspired to create a world liberated from the control of mega-institutions. The old hatred for the likes of IBM never did fade. On the other hand, they created networks that were designed to be all-encompassing and unrivaled.

That is the reason that the history of computing follows such a predictable pattern. Each pathbreaking innovation promises to liberate technology from the talons of the monopolists, to create a new network so democratic that it will transform human nature. Somehow, in each instance, humanity remains its familiar self. Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it.

The most important prophet of the new monopoly is an investor named Peter Thiel. He isn’t just any investor. His successes include PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX, an almost unrivaled record of sniffing out winners before they become chic, which suggests a deeper understanding of technology and its trajectory.

Thiel abhors the values of Darwinian competition.