World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
Franklin Foer
Penguin Press, 2017, 257 pp., $27
Franklin Foer’s title is something of a misnomer: His book isn’t about a world without mind so much as a United States with the wrong kinds of minds allegedly on the verge of devastating it. Withal, World Without Mind lays out a passionate, harrowing case that Americans are in danger of losing their democracy, their free will, their humanity to near-omnipotent technology companies, in particular, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet (the renamed Google; I’ll use “Google” in this review, because Foer, for the most part, uses it in his book). “The ascendant monopolies of today [the aforementioned tech companies] aspire to encompass all of existence….More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it.” An important, disquieting subject; how just is the author’s jeremiad?
Foer reaches way back in an attempt to trace how we arrived at where we are today, back to Descartes (a quester for pure mind), Gottfried Leibniz (“a prophet of the digital age” who originated the algorithm), and, in the 20th century, Alan Turing (in 1935 he “conceived of something he called the Logical Computing Machine. His vision, recorded on paper, became the blueprint for the digital revolution….Turing believed that the computer wasn’t just a machine, it was also a child, a being capable of learning”). Nearer to our own day, Foer, seemingly counterintuitively, cites Stewart Brand–he wrote the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture bible—as another technology oracle: “His gift was to channel the spiritual longings of his generation, and then to explain how they could be fulfilled by technology….Brand would come to inspire a revolution in computing. Engineers across Silicon Valley revered Brand for explaining the profound potential of their work….Where politics failed to transform humanity, computers just might.” But alas, “What began as a stirring dream—humanity tied together into a single transcendent network—has become the basis for monopoly. In the hands of Facebook and Google, Brand’s vision is a pretext for domination.”
Foer names other tech-titan precursors—Ray Kurzweil, for instance: For some important scientists and engineers working on artificial intelligence (AI), “it’s a theological pursuit. . . .the high priest of this religion is…Ray Kurzweil.” But space constraints compel me to get down to cases. One of Foer’s bêtes noires is Google (where since 2012 Kurzweil, I gather, has been the director of engineering). He asserts that “the company wants to create machines that replicate the human brain, and then advance beyond. This is the essence of its attempts to build an unabridged database of global knowledge and its efforts to train algorithms to become adept at finding patterns….” “AI,” he adds, is precisely the source of the company’s greatness.” What does Google ultimately desire? According to Foer, when Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and the current CEO of Alphabet, condemns competition and praises cooperation he is, effectively, making “a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.” If I understand Foer correctly, he is positing an imminent civilization in which Google controls our minds by dictating what our minds think about. If this is indeed Google’s goal then its one-time motto, “Don’t be evil,” is, in the breadth of its hypocrisy, evil.
Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder, chairman, and CEO of Facebook, is, like Larry Page, an idealist in a hurry; his credo is “Move Fast and Break Things.” But what does he want to break, and why? According to Foer, the answer to the first question is us; as for the second question, “Nobody,” he writes, “better articulates the modern faith in engineering’s power than Zuckerberg….The world will improve, if only Zuckerberg’s reason can prevail….” Of course the word improve can have different connotations for different people and unsurprisingly that is the case with Zuckerberg and Foer. Zuckerberg’s mighty algorithm, which determines what users see in their “news feed,” accounts for its extraordinary commercial success and serves as the proof of Zuckerberg’s worldview. But, Foer says, that redoubtable algorithm has its ominous aspects. It is, in effect, a people manipulator: Facebook’s “rules [are] devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation….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.” He sums up: “The company believes that it has unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding of its users than they possess themselves….” Zuckerberg presumably believes that Facebook’s data will allow the company to comprehend human motives and actions more thoroughly than they have ever been apprehended before. What this ultimately means, according to Foer, is, “Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will…” Foer also indicts Facebook for having disseminated “a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy….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.”
Once upon a time—well, in 1994—a young engineer named Jeff Bezos, “had arrived at a core truth: The world stood on the cusp of a knowledge boom….Indeed, this is what the Internet (and Bezos) has brought to pass….Bezos even had a vision, however underdeveloped, that this revolution would birth a new style of firm: the knowledge monopoly.” And so it came about: Amazon. Bezos, its founder, is now its chairman and CEO. He poses as an enemy of those old elitist fuddy-duddies, the rickety media enterprises that he believes were—are—hindrances to garnering every kind of knowledge: “Bezos sees his company as a platform—the world’s greatest bazaar, where anybody can sell their [sic] wares and anybody can buy them. No gatekeepers lurk in his domain, waiting to capriciously trample dreams.” Balderdash, Foer implies: A consumer—er, individual—confronting “the world’s digital trove of knowledge” is in an unnavigable labyrinth without the guidance techniques offered by Amazon (and “the other knowledge monopolists”). Also, those techniques remember: They know what you like, they befriend you, and they can gently steer and even influence your future desires. (It might be relevant at this point to mention that Amazon recently opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore on Manhattan’s West Side. A saleswoman told me that the books offered for sale are stocked on the basis of the company’s surveys of the literary tastes of the surrounding community. Perhaps Amazon’s version of realpolitik is why the store seems embarrassingly paltry.) Bezos’s ambition to dominate the knowledge industry seems, to Foer, to be inseparable from his contempt for those he would subdue.
[Amazon] deflated the prices of the books that it sells and made implicit arguments about their value….Bezos falsely implied that the cost of producing a book resided in printing and shipping, not in intellectual capital, creativity, and years of effort….What counts is addicting readers to [Amazon’s] devices and site, so that Amazon becomes a central fixture in their lives, an epicenter of leisure and consumption—exactly the same aspiration that Google and Facebook harbor.
Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for approximately $250 million, pocket change for this multibillionaire. Foer acknowledges that there have been improvements—or at least a maintaining of standards—at the newspaper, but overall, he doesn’t seem sanguine about the relationship.
Foer summarizes his book’s thesis this way: “. . .the knowledge monopolists have unique power in our democracy. They don’t just have the ability to pick the fate of a book, they can influence the fate of the Republic. By sorting information, they shape our opinions of issues and politicians.”
Is there any hope for our bedeviled nation? Foer proffers some ideas for wresting our frail democracy from the techno-tyrants, but since the book is steeped in melancholy, I have the sense that even he is ultimately not too optimistic that it can be done. One suggestion is “a Data Protection Authority to protect privacy as the government protects the environment…. The point isn’t to prevent the collection or exploitation of data. What are needed, however, are constraints, about what can be collected and what can be exploited. Citizens should have the right to purge data that sits [sic] on servers.” Unfortunately, since a D.P.A. (as Foer implies) would have to be a government agency to carry out its agenda, it would most likely contravene the First Amendment and be quashed by the courts. And even if it wasn’t, I suspect, skeptic that I am, that any bureaucracy that possesses the potential to impose censorship in all sorts of deplorable ways will eventually do so. Another of Foer’s proposals involves advertising. He believes that the giant tech companies are destroying—or have destroyed—the older (but still, he argues, vitally important) media institutions by seizing their advertising revenue. “Advertising has become an unwinnable battle [for long-established media]. Facebook and Google will always beat media….Money shifted because the tech monopolists simply do a much better job of steadily holding the attention of audiences.” His solution:
While media chase a fake audience, they consciously neglect their devoted readers. Subscribers to print editions are considered vestiges of a bygone era….That assumption requires reversing. 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….To rescue themselves, media will need to charge readers, and readers will need to pay.
One can only wish—but cynic that I am, I ponder the present and future of the august New York Times and wonder. (I have been a Times reader for decades, since I was a teenager, and cherish its news-gathering excellence.) For the past few years the paper has dedicated a reporter—the “Carpetbagger”—to follow filmdom’s long ditzy trail to the Academy Awards presentations. To be blunt, it’s an imprudent waste of manpower on a trite, inane subject. And while on the subject of the newspaper of record, it recently purged its copy editors, a ruthless assault on fact-checking and lucid writing. Foer insists that the Times “remains the most excellent paper in the world.” Maybe; but the Times still seems intent on chipping away at its news space, at least in its print version. I am currently peeved.
Foer, a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the former editor of the New Republic, is a good writer, and very intelligent and insightful. Because of those traits one must take World Without Mind seriously—and I do. But I can’t quite bring myself to assent to his bleak vision of our contemporary and possibly grave new world. Foer only briefly—very briefly—mentions the internet’s prevailing fake news crisis as well as the sinister Russian subversion of the 2016 presidential campaign (the two are intertwined, of course). But one could, I think, make a good case that fake news forays—and related phenomena like the sundry kinds of cybercrime—are aspects of the digital realm that are more pernicious than the still speculative (for the most part) iniquities that Foer dedicates his book to denouncing. (I suggest reading Charles Seife’s 2014 Virtual Unreality, which meticulously lays out the odious ways that the internet lies, cheats, and steals.) Also, Foer references Tim Wu’s The Master Switch (2010; it’s also worth reading), which proposes that thriving information technology companies invariably follow a life pattern that Wu (who has blurbed World Without Mind) calls “The Cycle”: Those companies start as someone’s brainstorm and metamorphose into behemoths. Foer draws on The Cycle to contend that Google, et al., “have reached the hardened end of Wu’s cycle. We need to entertain the possibility that the monopolies of our day may be even more firmly entrenched than the giants in whose path they stride.” What Foer fails to mention about Wu’s cycle is that in its final stage the “giants” become unimaginative, incapable of responding to changing times and opportunities—bureaucratically sclerotic. This should offer Foer some comfort, because if Wu’s argument is valid and if Google, et al., are indeed at their “hardened ends,” they will soon enough be vulnerable to new upstart technologies, created to best and better Bezos and his counterparts.
There is a subtext in World Without Mind, an unexpected one that is surprisingly moving. I mentioned the book’s melancholia, which is only partly attributable to the dystopia the author foresees. It is also rooted in his experiences during his second stint—2012–14—as the editor of the New Republic. He tried, really—I believe him—to cooperate with his last publisher, an erstwhile Facebook VIP who had hit it really big and brought his Silicon Valley ethos to the respected journal, his new toy. And so Foer went along with the publisher’s tactics to draw eyeballs (which would attract ads and money) to the magazine’s website. Eventually—inevitably?—the publisher told Foer, “We’re a technology company,” and within a year Foer resigned right before he was to be fired; most of the editorial staff resigned with him. One feels how painful Foer’s recounting of this is for him. As he says, his “vision of the world [was] moralistic and romantic [I would add pragmatic to the list]”—not technocratic (though he’s not a technophobe). One of the things he is a romantic about is those reputedly archaic media businesses, large and small, businesses that he believes, for all their faults (his cognizance of these is his pragmatism working), are integral to a healthy, viable democracy. I too, who have gadded about on the fringes of that passé media world, think its loss would be a disaster for this country. I can’t prove it but I’m certain that I’m right.
Morality, pragmatism and, yes, romanticism are among the assets of a good editor. One of the things that World Without Mind did convince me of is that our society would benefit if Franklin Foer obtains another editor’s position.