World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

As with the food giants, the big tech companies have given rise to a new science that aims to construct products that pander to the tastes of their consumers. They want to overhaul the entire chain of cultural production, so that they can capture greater profit. Intellectuals, freelance writers, investigative journalists, and midlist novelists are the analog to the family farmers, who have always struggled but simply can’t compete in this transformed economy.

As with so many aspects of the Internet, Microsoft had misjudged the shape of things to come. Microsoft tried to refashion itself as a state-of-the art media company, but its efforts were clunky and expensive. It made the mistake of actually producing editorial content. Its successors—Facebook, Google, Apple—didn’t repeat that error. They surpassed Microsoft by adapting a revolutionary approach: the domination of media without hiring writers and editors, without owning much of anything.

To survive, media companies lost track of their values. Even journalists of the highest integrity have internalized a new mind-set; they worry about how to successfully pander to Google’s and Facebook’s algorithms. In pursuit of clicks, some of our nation’s most important purveyors of news have embraced sensationalism; they have published dubious stories; they have heaped attention on propagandists and conspiracists, one of whom was elected president of the United States. Facebook and Google have created a world where the old boundaries between fact and falsehood have eroded, where misinformation spreads virally.

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.

Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait. In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments.

“Hacking” is a loaded term, and a potentially alienating one, at least to shareholders who crave sensible rule-abiding leadership. But by the time Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he’d stripped the name of most of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial philosophy that contains barely a hint of rebelliousness. It might even be the opposite of rebelliousness. Hackers, he told one interviewer, were “just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible. That’s what I try to encourage our engineers to do here.” To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible Facebook citizen—a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service of conformism.

For centuries, engineers automated physical labor; our new engineering elite has automated thought. They have perfected technologies that take over intellectual processes, that render the brain redundant. Or as Marissa Mayer once argued, “You have to make words less human and more a piece of the machine.” Indeed, we have begun to outsource our intellectual work to companies that suggest what we should learn, the topics we should consider, and the items we ought to buy. These companies can justify their incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-Simon and Comte articulated: They are supplying us with efficiency; they are imposing order on human life.

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.

Algorithms

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

Despite all Silicon Valley’s sloganeering about building a more transparent world, their ideals stop at the threshold of their offices.

(The one year we turned a profit, we celebrated with a pizza party that pushed us back into the red.)

The headline is, of course, an ancient journalistic art form. But Upworthy—and its legions of imitators—subjected it to positivistic rigor. 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. The core insight of Upworthy, BuzzFeed, Vox, and the other emerging Internet behemoths was that editorial success could be engineered—that if you listened to the data, it was possible to craft pieces that would win massive audiences. This was an insight embraced across the industry, even at sober places like the Washington Post. And it was an insight that wormed its way into the New Republic. 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 ...

At the beginning of the century, the profession was in extremis. A series of recessions prodded media companies to gamble everything on a digital future, a future unencumbered by the clunky, bureaucratic apparatus of publishing on paper. The sense of crisis and opportunity quickly remade the old newsrooms. Over the course of a decade, journalism shed $1.6 billion worth of reporter and editor salaries. At the same time that journalism shriveled, its prestige collapsed. One survey ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job in America, edging out lumberjack and parole officer.

SILICON VALLEY’S VIEW OF CREATIVITY is medieval. Europe, in the era before the Enlightenment, didn’t think much of authors.

Yet there’s really no shortening the time it takes to write a book or a magazine article of substance—and there’s nothing that can be done to change that without changing the fundamental nature of the enterprise. No penny-pinching technology can remove the human from the fundamental process of creation, no piece of software can speed the production of thought, even as the cost of producing books gallops ahead with the rest of the economy. For many centuries, publishers lived in denial of cost disease. In fact, they spent large parts of their day in denial of the fact that they worked for fully capitalist enterprises.

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.

Facebook puts it this way: “By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.” But we know this is an illusion. Facebook leads us to a destination that is the precise opposite of its proclaimed ideal. It creates a condition that Eli Pariser has called the “Filter Bubble.” Facebook’s algorithms supply us with the material that we like to read and will feel moved to share. It’s not hard to see the intellectual and political perils of this impulse. The algorithms unwittingly supply readers with texts and videos that merely confirm deeply felt beliefs and biases; the algorithms suppress contrary opinions that might agitate a user. Liberals are deluged with liberal opinions; vegetarians are presented with endless vegetarian agitprop; the alt-right is fed alt-right garbage; and so on. Facebook shields us from the sort of challenging disagreement—although not from the idiocy of trolls and the blather of comments sections—that might change our minds or help us to better understand the views of our fellow citizens.

The hive mind was meant to describe a thing of beauty, humanity working in gorgeous concert. But really, who would want to live in a hive? We know from history that this sort of consensus is a plastic beauty, a stifling sameness. It deadens disagreement, strangles originality.

It’s hard to have sympathy with Walmart or Home Depot or the other big-box stores. They hardly pay the largest tax rates in the nation. Still, they cough up a reasonable sum. Over the last decade, Walmart, the supposed Beast of Bentonville, handed over about 30 percent of its income in taxes; Home Depot paid 38 percent. We can bemoan the fact that they don’t pay more, yet it seems reasonable to note that their prime competitor isn’t paying even half that rate. Amazon averaged an effective tax rate of 13 percent—that includes taxes owed to states and localities, as well as the feds and foreign governments. Apple and Alphabet were only slightly less adventurous with their avoidance. They both paid a rate of about 16 percent.

The Internet is amazing, but we shouldn’t treat it as if it exists outside history or is exempt from our moral structures, especially when the stakes are nothing less than the fate of individuality and the fitness of democracy.

The time has arrived to liberate media from their reliance on advertising. Media need to scale back their ambitions, to return to their niches, to reclaim the loyalty of core audiences—a move that will yield superior editorial and sustainable businesses, even if such retrenchment would crush owners’ (mostly delusional) fantasies of getting gobbled by conglomerates or launching IPOs. To rescue themselves, media will need to charge readers, and readers will need to pay.