World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

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. Regulators and judges chanted the phrase “diversity of voices.” The Supreme Court viewed the First Amendment as reason enough for the government to block media companies (especially broadcasters) from becoming monopolists. 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.

When Random House bought Alfred A. Knopf in 1960, Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general, William Rogers, was alarmed enough to have his office make calls about the implications of the deal. (He let the matter drop when he learned that the new entity would control less than 1 percent of the market.)

The telegraph was the first instance of electronic communication. It relayed information instantaneously, across nations and then oceans. When it appeared, the speed and range of the telegraph sparked paroxysms of euphoria, much like the rhapsodic predictions that greeted the arrival of the World Wide Web.

One company, Western Union, was best positioned to privatize this network, and it would come to dominate telegraphy for the next hundred years.

Western Union wasn’t more technologically adept than its competitors; it simply seized the opportunities as they came. When the industry became overcrowded with ill-fated competitors, Western Union swallowed the weaker firms and combined into an implacable behemoth.

In 1870, the Brits nationalized their telegraph system, housing it within their postal service. Ulysses S. Grant and a raft of politicians openly contemplated doing the same here. Between 1866 and 1900, congressmen introduced seventy bills to have the postal service take over telegraphy. The success of Western Union, therefore, hinged on its ability to control the terms of the political debate. And its tactics for swaying members of Congress could be quite raw. Until the 1910s, telegraphy was so expensive that only businesses could afford the service. But Western Union wired offices in the Capitol Building and gave elected officials unlimited free use of the system. According to memos in the Western Union archive, the company privately considered this the “cheapest means” of calming its critics in Washington.

Freebies were merely a first line of defense—and relatively innocuous compared with Western Union’s other ploys. Its protective shell was the press. More specifically, Western Union formed an impregnable alliance with the Associated Press (AP)—an organization that had achieved an impressive monopoly of its own. The AP supplied American newspapers with an endless stream of copy that helped them to economically fill their pages. Most American newspapers couldn’t afford to send correspondents to Washington or Europe, and the AP’s network of reporters allowed them to fill that gap. More than 80 percent of the copy in western papers, according to one survey, came from the wire service. Newspapers relied on the AP, and the AP exploited that reliance. It insisted that its clients use no other wire service. Even worse, it insisted that its clients never say a bad public word about the organization.

Newspapers that spoke ill of Western Union were tossed from the AP—as was the case with the Omaha Republican, punished for having the temerity to describe the telegraph company as an “onerous” and “grievous” monopoly.

For four months, the result of the election remained hotly contested—so hotly that there were fears that the controversy would culminate in violence and a second civil war. During that long stretch of squabbling, Western Union gave Smith unfettered access to telegrams sent by Democratic strategists. Smith then passed along the purloined information to Hayes—which allowed the Republicans to outmaneuver Tilden and his allies.

MY OWN SMALL BRUSH with monopoly came at an ill-timed juncture in my career as editor of the New Republic.

After my first meeting with the CEO, I wasn’t so sure. His name was Guy Vidra, an alumnus of various tech start-ups,

This was the fall of 2014—and contract negotiations between Amazon and the publishing giant Hachette had grown protracted and foul. I hadn’t much cared about the early months of the contretemps, which pitted a monopoly against an oligopoly.

My essay appeared under a headline that had fists. The cover blared, “Amazon Must Be Stopped.” The piece described why the government should get tough with Amazon for transgressing antitrust laws. It found an audience, but fairly quickly receded from the forefront of my mind. Attention was pretty clearly needed elsewhere. My intraoffice campaign for survival seemed to be floundering. One afternoon, I sat at my computer as I received email from six different media reporters seeking to confirm rumors that I was about to be fired. “This isn’t the most comfortable question, but here goes . . .” It was at that awkward moment that Amazon decided that it would punish the New Republic. Our ad sales department received a note, informing us that Amazon would be yanking its advertising for its new political comedy, Alpha House. The missive left nothing to the imagination. “In light of the cover article about Amazon, Amazon has decided to terminate the Alpha House campaign currently running on the New Republic. Please confirm receipt of this email and that the campaign has been terminated.” It was signed, “Team Amazon.”

We shouldn’t be hyperbolic about the knowledge monopolies. The Associated Press’s schemes from the nineteenth century are an extreme case. Most media barons don’t aspire to rig presidential elections. Their interests are far more parochial. In this way, they are no different from any other big business. They want to stave off the regulators and the tax man; they want to protect their business from the incursions of government, and to inhale government largesse, when profit can be made.

This was the one way in which I had significantly underestimated the power of Jeff Bezos. When I worked with colleagues to put together a conference on Amazon at a center-left think tank, some of our comrades suddenly lost their nerve.

THE HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR Jonathan Zittrain has spun the following hypothetical scenario. There’s a down-to-the-wire election. Mark Zuckerberg has a strong opinion about the candidate he would like to prevail. As we have seen, Facebook claims that it can boost voter turnout, carefully placing reminders of civic duty in News Feeds on Election Day, generating social pressure to head to the polls. That this experiment worked isn’t just a public relations claim, but an established finding of social science. In the Zittrain scenario, Zuckerberg launches another get-out-the-vote effort. Only this time, the reminders are placed selectively. Facebook has a pretty good sense of your political affiliation, based on all the items you’ve liked. Facebook can also discern your voting precinct. So instead of urging all citizens to perform their civic duty, Facebook calibrates its call to action to target only the voters who will pull the lever for Zuckerberg’s candidate.

The idea that a tech company would favor a candidate is hardly novel. Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, threw himself behind Barack Obama in the 2012 election. He muddied himself in the arcane details of the campaign, not just writing checks, but recruiting talent and helping build its technological apparatus.

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

A LARGER AUDIENCE WAS CLEARLY within reach. That was the lesson that journalism was absorbing. We could even reduce the lesson to a mathematical equation. Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed and the William Randolph Hearst of our era, has expressed it this way: R = ζ.* The formula supposedly illustrates how a piece of editorial content could go viral—how it could travel through the social networks to quickly reach a massive audience, as rapidly as smallpox ripped its way across North America. Peretti’s formula, in fact, came from epidemiology. The nod to science was intentional. With experimentation and careful reading of data, science could suggest which pieces had the best shot at achieving virality—and if not virality, then at least a robust audience.

Psychologists had discovered that a state of unquenchable curiosity could be cultivated. Humans are comfortable with ignorance, but they hate feeling deprived of information. Upworthy designed headlines to make readers feel an almost primal hunger for information just outside their grasp. It pioneered a style—which it called the “curiosity gap”—that explicitly teased readers, withholding just enough information to titillate the reader into going further. Classic example: “9 out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.” Six million readers couldn’t contain themselves and followed that link. (The mind-blowing fact: income inequality is far worse than most Americans think.)

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. (Upworthy found tremendous success when it used variations of the sentence “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”) These formulas were so effective that they became commonplace across the Web—so overused that readers grew wise to the tricks and the formulas lost their powers, which led to the frantic scramble to discover the next new thing.

Chris installed a data guru on our staff to increase our odds of producing viral hits. In weekly meetings, the guru would come armed with topics that we would be wise to pursue. He would keep a careful eye on the topics trending on Facebook, so that we could create content that might ride a wave of popularity. He looked back on historical data to see what the public craved a year ago, so that we could produce pieces in sync with the seasonal interests of readers.

“snackable content”—these

serious, but the presentation had to be fast and fun, geared to spread via Facebook. Chris was adamant about the necessity of producing this kind of work, because the methods for producing snackable content were so obvious—and, in his view, required little effort. We simply had to mimic the rest of the Internet—write about the same outrage as everyone else, jump on the same topic of the moment. Clicks would rain down upon us if only we could get over ourselves and post the same short clips from The Daily Show as everyone else, framed by an appealing headline and perhaps a conscience-salving paragraph or two of analysis. A Jon Stewart rant was can’t-miss stuff. It was hard to argue with his logic. Everyone else was doing this. They were doing it because it worked.

Commercialism had a strange, unexpected consequence. Only after newspapers came to depend on the market for survival did journalism self-consciously reject the pressures of the market. Journalism came to insist on its objectivity, to describe its mission as nothing less than the pursuit of Truth. There were sociological reasons for this new high-mindedness. Advertising created an explosion of newspapers—and that swelled the ranks of writers and editors. The employees of newspapers aspired to join the ranks of the respectable professions. Instead of shading the truth and spouting opinions, newspaper writers began to view themselves as “reporters”—faithfully recounting reality. Interviewing was an esoteric practice in the mid-nineteenth century; by World War I, it was an essential part of the job. Advertisers liked the idea of professionalism, too. They preferred to sell their wares next to the least controversial, least alienating copy possible. And though owners might rather have used papers as their own playthings, they came to accept the new way of neutral just-the-facts reporting—which gave their papers (and themselves) a new legitimacy.

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.”

It’s not that these companies don’t have aspirations toward journalistic greatness. BuzzFeed, Vice, and the Huffington Post want to be postmodern newspapers. They invest in excellent reporting and have first-rate journalists on their staffs. But these companies don’t try to insulate themselves from the pressures of the market.

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 understood how, more than at any moment in recent history, media need to give the public what it wants, a circus that exploits subconscious tendencies and biases. Even if media disdained Trump’s outrages, they built him up as a character and a plausible candidate. 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.

Magazines and newspapers used to think of themselves as something coherent—an issue, an edition, an institution. Not as the publisher of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

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.) The wall isn’t fully breached, however. There’s usually a tag indicating that the article has been “sponsored” or “paid for by advertisers.” But it’s as discreet as possible, and that’s the point.

To sell ads, it helps to create an environment where advertisers feel assured that their message will be heard, or rather mistaken for editorial. BuzzFeed was the reductio ad absurdum of this. Very early in its life, it decided to make branded advertising its chief stream of revenue. To bolster this pursuit, it generated reams of stories that sounded just like press releases. Andrew Sullivan made sport of pointing this out. He ran a feature called “Guess Which BuzzFeed Piece Is an Ad.” It was damn near impossible to detect any difference—“19 Incredible Things You Didn’t Know About Dunkin’ Donuts”; “The New iPhone Keyboard Changes Everything”; “The Only Post You Need to Read About the PlayStation 4.” (Those were all supposedly legitimate works of journalism, not advertising.) How confused was BuzzFeed about the difference between advertising and editorial? When writers published pieces critical of advertisers, BuzzFeed management vanished them from its site. (After public outcry, BuzzFeed conceded its sins and vowed not to repeat them.)

The relationship between advertiser and media is transformed. You can see the change in the language—“sponsor.” Advertisers are no longer simply buying real estate to sell their products; they are acting as sort of beneficent patrons of journalism.

Chris Hughes recruited the billionaire activist Tom Steyer to pay hundreds of thousands for a new section of our Web site that would cover how climate change played in congressional elections—even as Steyer spent millions trying to influence those elections to elevate the issue of climate change. Chris also recruited Credit Suisse to pay for a new section of our Web site devoted to the future of banking, just as the bank tried to recover from accusations of tax evasion.

Silicon Valley has waged war on professional writers, attempting to weaken the copyright laws that make it possible for authors to make a living from their pen. It has pursued a business plan that radically deflates the value of knowledge, which renders writing a cheap, disposable commodity. To pull off this strategy, it has attempted to puncture the prestige of the professional author. This

While Lessig wrote about the niceties of the law, his real argument was about culture. Despite his elite pedigree—Oxbridge degree, Supreme Court clerkship—he formulated a case that was radical, borderline utopian. He wrote with wonderstruck lyricism. The Internet would change the means of cultural production, he argued. In the twentieth century, culture had been ripped from the people. It had been placed under the rule of avaricious corporations, which pumped out profitable dreck. The masses were reduced to mere consumers, passive couch-bound recipients of movies, television, and music produced in Los Angeles and New York. “Never before in the history of human culture had [creative culture] been as professionalized, never before as concentrated. Never before has the creativity of the millions been as effectively displaced.” The Internet represented an opportunity to transcend that model, or rather, it could revive a very old one.

During the early years of the Internet, theorists of technology aggressively celebrated amateurism. Elites had a chokehold on the country that prevented the masses from expressing their creativity. Clay Shirky described the pent-up genius as “cognitive surplus.” The Internet helped unleash this surplus—it allowed bloggers to express the truths that careerist pundits dared not speak; citizen journalists scored new scoops; Wikipedia soon trumped Britannica with its depth and range.

Wordsworth spent decades lobbying for a substantial extension of copyright, created one hundred years earlier in the Statute of Anne. “Deny it to him, and you unfeelingly leave a weight upon his spirits, which must deaden his exertions; or you force him to turn his facilities . . . to inferior employments.”

But the Founders were imperfect protectors of authorship. They wrote copyright into the Constitution, but also left a yawning loophole. American law said nothing about the rights extended to foreign works. Bootleg copies of British books came to inundate the American market.

Mark Twain saw through this hokum. He became a leading champion of tightening the screws on American copyright. When he pressed the case, he unknowingly nodded to Kipling’s protests. “This country is being flooded with the best of English literature at prices which make a package of water closet paper seem an ‘edition de luxe’ in comparison.” Publishers came to see the wisdom in his critique. Or more to the point, they were caught in a very ungentlemanly price war. Upstart firms flooded the market with cut-rate editions. After so many decades of seeing copyright legislation as inimical, publishers came to view it as a raft that would carry them back to the shores of profitability. In 1891, Congress heeded the plans of publishers and extended copyright to foreign works. The law set in place a new economics, which transformed American writing from hobby to profession. This is the structure that the tech companies want to overturn.

Professions are exclusionary; not everyone can earn a living from the pen. But the advent of book advances, magazine jobs, and hefty fees for writing assignments made writing a viable path for a far vaster population, who couldn’t find the hours for such a consuming pastime. Almost immediately after Twain’s triumph, writing was liberated from the privileged grasp of Brahmins.

I came to see that the sum Cowley paid was the disturbing revelation: $150 for a review. When I saw this figure in a letter, it gave me a stir. It was precisely the same amount the New Republic still paid for reviews of approximately the same length that we published on our Web site.

Over thirty-four years, writers took a 50 percent pay cut. The present salary lurks not much higher than the government’s official poverty line. Writing, a profession that once seemed fairly central to the project of Western civilization, is barely above water.

With its market share, publishers are utterly dependent on the Bezos behemoth to sell their product. This gives Amazon the power to squeeze and further squeeze its suppliers, to dictate terms to publishers. Its contracts with publishers extract capricious fees and far larger chunks of profit than a more competitive marketplace would demand. Publishers have acquiesced to Amazon at times, and violently resisted at others. Yet there’s no real recourse. When Amazon tightens its chokehold around publishers, it is authors who suffer. The houses shrink the number of titles they publish; they carve the advances they pay to authors into smaller chunks, doled out over larger spans of time. We can hardly ascribe the collapse in author pay to Amazon alone, but it has become a primary driver of the deflation of writing. Facebook and Google have found an even more effective cure for writing’s cost disease. They never, ever, under any circumstances, pay for it.