World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

There’s always been a strange, unacknowledged convergence in the thinking of technological dreamers and the rapacious industrial monopolists of the Gilded Age. Both like to imagine escaping the rigors of competitive capitalism; both wax elegiac about the virtues of “cooperation,” which they invoke as a matter of economic necessity. There are certain systems—the telephone and telegraph are classic examples—that simply never would have flourished in a competitive market. The costs of setting up a massive network are immense. Imagine the expense of laying down all those lines crisscrossing the continent. The inefficiency of rival networks is too great. We must, therefore, forgive the size of the firms that provide these essential services—and give them space to cooperate with the government and other big firms so that they can prudently eliminate waste and make disinterested strategic choices. This was what the visionary Theodore Vail, who built AT&T in the first decades of the last century, claimed: “Competition means strife, industrial warfare; it means contention; it oftentimes means taking advantage of or resorting to any means that the conscience of the contestants . . . will permit.” Even the railroad barons, the most conniving creatures that capitalism ever created, extolled the virtues of altruistic collaboration. J. P. Morgan himself sincerely believed this gospel. As the biographer Ron Chernow writes, “America’s most famous financier was a sworn foe of free markets.”