World Without Mind Quotes

“Back in the seventies, Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“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. Through their accumulation of data, they have constructed a portrait of our minds, which they use to invisibly guide mass behavior (and increasingly individual behavior) to further their financial interests. They have eroded the integrity of institutions—media, publishing—that supply the intellectual material that provokes thought and guides democracy. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“The contemplative life remains freely available to us through our choices—what we read and buy, how we commit to leisure and self-improvement, the passing over of empty temptation, our preservation of the quiet spaces, an intentional striving to become the masters of our mastery.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. That's always been a danger of the engineering mindset, as it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and beings to design a more perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in their grand design”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Even though Silicon Valley’s monopolies exist for the sake of profit, they view themselves as revolutionary agents, elevating the world to the state of oneness that Brand spent his life chasing.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Just as the world took a neoliberal turn, the National Science Foundation conceived a multi-year plan for privatizing the internet….The euphoria of capitalism’s triumph set the tone for the internet’s emergence.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“It's a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“If we believe we’re being watched, we’re far less likely to let our minds roam toward opinions that require courage or might take us beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. We begin to bend our opinions to please our observer.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“THE ALGORITHM IS A NOVEL PROBLEM for democracy. Technology companies boast, with little shyness, about how they can nudge users toward more virtuous behavior—how they can induce us to click, to read, to buy, or even to vote. These tactics are potent, because we don’t see the hand steering us. We don’t know how information has been patterned to prod us. Despite all Silicon Valley’s sloganeering about building a more transparent world, their ideals stop at the threshold of their offices.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“There are only so many hours in the day for amateur pursuits—and very few writers are as gifted as Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath, able to generate something lasting from stolen moments.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“But in the end, the hackers were misunderstood figures. They wanted nothing more than to belong, to subsume their brilliant selves in an even more incandescent whole, to lose themselves in the poetry of community.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“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.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Just as Nabisco and Kraft wanted to change how we eat and what we eat, Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Like Donald Trump, Silicon Valley is part of the great American tradition of sham populism.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“a dominant class enforces rules about what is and is not acceptable. It defines good art, good food, good books—and creates an exclusionary vocabulary for describing them”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“we’re constantly watched and always distracted”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“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.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Companies that are indifferent to democracy have acquired an outsized role in it.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Journalism was vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the justification for such fanaticism about building a thick, tall wall between the two. The fear was that we’d enter a world where readers couldn’t tell the difference between editorial and advertising—where the corrupt hand of advertisers would interfere with the journalistic search for truth. Those fears are in the process of being realized.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“But there’s another way to describe the convenience of the machine: It is the surrender of free will—algorithms make choices for us.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“We’re watched on the Internet so that companies can more effectively sell us goods. The fact that Internet surveillance isn’t totalitarian, however, doesn’t mean that it does us no harm. We’re watched so that we can be manipulated.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Bourdieu argued that a dominant class enforces rules about what is and is not acceptable. It defines good art, good food, good books—and creates an exclusionary vocabulary for describing them. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” he famously wrote.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Bernays developed a thoroughgoing critique of book publishing, which he accused of underpricing its product. But he also came up with an ingenious formula for transforming the industry: bookshelves. “Where there are bookshelves, there will be books,” he confidently asserted. Bookshelves were alien to most American homes, a luxury reserved for Jay Gatsby and his kind. Bernays methodically went about introducing bookshelves to the middle class. He persuaded architects to include them in their plans and encouraged stories in magazines (House Beautiful, American Home, Woman’s Home Companion) that celebrated built-in shelving. The shelves were obviously an adornment, but also more than that. The presence of books in the household was implicitly meant to signify social advancement—books were hallmarks of the ascendant professional class, whose jobs demanded intellectual skills; they were consumer goods that indicated purchasing power.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“They have allowed the endless feedback loop of the Web—the never-ending flood of data—to shape their editorial sensibility, to determine their editorial investments.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Each pathbreaking innovation promises to liberate technology from the talons of the monopolists, to create a new network so democratic that it will transform human nature. Somehow, in each instance, humanity remains its familiar self. Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. Monopoly is the danger that a powerful firm will use its dominance to squash the diversity of competition. Conformism is the danger that one of those monopolistic firms, intentionally or inadvertently, will use its dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech