World Without Mind

by Franklin Foer Jonathan Cape 272pp £18.99

“Franklin Foer is furious,” said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. As his new book’s subtitle – The Existential Threat of Big Tech – suggests, he “believes that tech companies are ruining the world”. Though he is hardly the first to make such a claim, World Without Mind is a lively, hard-hitting polemic. Google, Amazon, Facebook and the like have, Foer contends, “degraded the intellectual discourse” of an entire civilisation. Their founders may pose as laid-back utopians, but in reality they are rapacious empirebuilders, often with undemocratic instincts. Foer is especially good at showing how big tech has subverted traditional journalism – which, in turn, threatens democracy. The spread of Silicon Valley’s click-chasing mindset has led to “a deluge of ephemera dissecting the ephemeral”. As distinguishing fact from fiction becomes increasingly difficult, and populations retreat into polarised positions, it is easier for populists like Donald Trump to get elected.

“Foer has his own axe to grind,” said Rana Foroohar in the Financial Times. In 2012, he was installed as editor of the New York political magazine New Republic by Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder “who bought the publication as a vanity project”. Hughes promised to promote long-form journalism, but what he actually wanted was a huge expansion of what Foer calls “snackable content”; Foer was fired after two-and-a-half years. Yet World Without Mind isn’t “just a hack’s sour grapes”, said Helen Lewis in The Sunday Times. It makes important points about the “largely invisible” power of the tech giants and the role of data (which Foer calls the “new oil”) in the modern economy. This is a timely, “elegant” reminder that we are “sleepwalking” into a world where we’re “constantly watched and constantly distracted”.