World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

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.

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. If there were a picture of the whole Earth, man, that would change everything. Thus began Brand’s campaign of heckling NASA into releasing a color photograph of the whole Earth. He soon hitchhiked east to sell buttons on college campuses, which trumpeted his demand. This crusade, quixotic as it now sounds, helped awaken the environmental movement.

at Xerox’s famed freewheeling cauldron of creativity, its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). One of the chief engineers there, Alan Kay, ordered every book listed in the Whole Earth Catalog and assembled them in an office library. Over the years, Kay would lavishly credit Brand for pointing toward the future: “For us at PARC, he was the guy who was giving us the early warning system about what computers were going to be.”

Brand depicted the computer scientists exactly as he wanted to see them—as the great emancipators of technology: “Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.”

In a short treatise called Zero to One, he wrote, “More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.”

Turing certainly enjoyed playing the role of scientific scold, gleefully mocking all those who nervously fretted over the implications of new inventions. “One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other ‘My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!’” he quipped.

Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly addicts them.

Computer scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for patterns: They talk about torturing the data until it confesses. Yet this metaphor contains unexamined implications. Data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear.

The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organizations that run the machines.

But as Amazon continues its march, its ambition keeps expanding. It wants to populate the skies with drones. It will provide the essential technological infrastructure for governments. It will set the tone for the future of the workplace and the future of the economy, as well as the future of the culture. Amazon’s power isn’t an incidental subject for public debate; it is an essential one.

Eric Schmidt once bragged, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

Brandeis wrote, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”

The year Facebook went public, it recorded $1.1 billion in American profits, but didn’t pay a cent of federal or state income tax. Indeed, it earned a $429 million refund.

When government tries to remodel the economy for the sake of efficiency, it has amassed a mixed record. When government uses its power to achieve clear moral ends, it has a strong record.

The average British citizen spent one pound or less on books each year, which depressed Orwell to no end. He concluded his essay with this bit of sourness: “It is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100 per cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.”