World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier. But we’ve spent too long marveling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our own role in determining the human path. Once we cross certain thresholds—once we transform the values of institutions, once we abandon privacy—there’s no turning back, no restoring our lost individuality.

which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted.

We’ve all become a bit cyborg. Our phone is an extension of our memory; we’ve outsourced basic mental functions to algorithms; we’ve handed over our secrets to be stored on servers and mined by computers.

“We can’t put it together. It is together.”

The healing powers of the network could be found in McLuhan’s famous maxim: The medium is the message. Technology was the thing that mattered. He heaped blame upon Gutenberg’s invention, print, a medium he believed divided the world, isolating us from our fellow humans in the antisocial act of reading. “The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialization,” he lamented. It produced a “desert of classified data.”

“Money is not the greatest of motivators.

It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion.”

They wanted nothing more than to belong,

shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square.

wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.”

“No one can succeed by themselves. . . . The only way you can achieve something magnificent is by working with other people.”