World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
(Penguin, $27)
Franklin Foer’s latest presents a “cogently scary case” that Big Tech is creating a world that will be, as he puts it, “less individual” and “less human,” said Steven Zeitchik in the Los Angeles Times. The Atlantic staff writer argues that despite Silicon Valley’s professions of wanting to help society, its true endgame is the advancement of a terrifying ideological agenda. Google, whose original motto was “Don’t be evil,” is today, in Foer’s eyes, creating an artificial intelligence leviathan designed to eliminate human autonomy. He charges Amazon with squelching potential criticism through a make-or-break grip on authors and publishers. And he views Facebook as a puppet master engaged in stealth social engineering experiments. The tech giants’ data-driven algorithms are “meant to erode free will,” Foer writes, making people “screws and rivets in their grand design.” Foer’s anti-behemoth diatribe is “not afraid to roll up its sleeves and make things personal,” said Jason Heller in NPR.org. The author himself has a fraught history with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who bought the New Republic in 2012. Two years later, Foer quit as the magazine’s editor amid disputes with Hughes over digital publishing strategy, spurring a highly publicized staff exodus. Hughes is “pilloried at length” in World Without Mind. Foer also gets personal with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google duo Larry Page and Sergey Brin—offering “concise, insightful psychological profiles of each mover and shaker, detailing how they’ve mixed utopianism and monopolism into an insidious whole.”
Lingering hurt feelings might be the reason Foer’s case against the tech giants wobbles between strong arguments and “exaggerated scaremongering,” Steven Poole said in The Wall Street Journal. Foer is “substantially less well informed technically” than other writers who’ve raised similar concerns about Big Tech. He appears to believe, for example, that the term “algorithm” is newfangled jargon. He attributes Google’s ability to guess your search request as you type it to artificial intelligence, when really the service is merely listing the most popular ways to finish the phrase you started. Foer is clearly troubled that the monopolistic tendencies of Apple, Amazon, and Google have gutted the financial health of publishers and music companies, The Economist said. But he offers only “breezy” solutions to the large worries he stokes in a book that “flits between history, philosophy, and politics.” Foer is right to be skeptical of Big Tech and to urge deeper scrutiny. But “his is not the final word.”