Big Tech’s Heavy Hand

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Are companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon ‘shredding’ individuality with their pervasive collection of our individual data? Steven Poole reviews ‘World Without Mind’ by Franklin Foer.

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The urbanist Adam Greenfield’s “Radical Technologies” (2017) argues compellingly against the “colonization of everyday life” by information processing; in “To Save Everything, Click Here” (2013), Evgeny Morozov [JB note: Belorussia-born Morozov, an early skeptic the inevitably coming "cyberutopia" proclaimed by the intellectually ahistorical innocent fans of the wonders of the Internet and the future  infomration utopia it supposedly promised; Morozov has been oddly quiet in recent years;] demolished the rhetoric of “solutionism,” according to which Silicon Valley can solve social problems with technology; and computer scientist and polymath Jaron Lanier has argued for years that we give too much of our personal data away. Mr. Foer adds little to such discussions while barely crediting any forebears. “The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies,” he writes early on, as if he is the first to have the bright idea of doing so.

It’s a drawback, too, that Mr. Foer is substantially less well-informed technically than other writers who have treated these topics. He thinks Google’s ability to autocomplete your search term is an example of its proficiency in artificial intelligence, when it is simply applied statistics—the engine offers the term most commonly entered by other users. He credulously asserts that Google’s “brain” is one “unhindered by human bias,” when the far more serious problem is that modern AI systems routinely reinforce the human biases baked into the data they learn from.

Mr. Foer also appears to think that the term “algorithm” (essentially a step-by-step recipe for performing a task) is relatively newfangled jargon, when it dates from the 19th century. Were he sounder on such basics, one might forgive him for adopting a skeptical tone toward prominent cyber-theorists such as Ray Kurzweil, a computing pioneer who, it says here, began “manically swallowing pills” to prolong his own life. (Surely it’s more likely that he swallowed all those pills with great aforethought and deliberation.)

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WORLD WITHOUT MIND

By Franklin Foer
Penguin Press, 257 pages, $27

The real interest of the book lies in the fragments of memoir scattered about, describing Mr. Foer’s own experience in what digital prophets contemptuously call the “legacy media.” At the New Republic, Mr. Foer wrote an essay critical of Amazon’s abusive and threatening behavior toward publishers, after which Amazon terminated lucrative advertising with the magazine. And he tells, not without an air of spurned-artist score settling, the story of how the New Republic was bought by Chris Hughes, a young investor who had made a fortune at Facebook and initially seemed enthusiastic about preserving the biweekly’s cultural and political legacy. Instead, Mr. Hughes ended up pursuing a strategy of maximizing web traffic, to the dismay of the magazine’s tweedy team. Mr. Foer resigned, and much of the editorial staff walked out in support.

The answer for “old media” institutions, Mr. Foer concludes correctly, is simply to charge money for what is these days dispiritingly called “content.” He points to continued strong sales of books in the U.S., concluding: “Consumers have no inherent problem paying for words, so long as publishers place a price tag on them.” Indeed, contrary to the briefly fashionable claims of cyber-hustlers who insisted that newspapers could survive only by being free, some version of what is now with childish resentment termed a “paywall” is plainly what works for publishers—and the public.

Perhaps the continued influence of hurt feelings is what causes Mr. Foer’s case throughout to wobble between good arguments strongly expressed and unproductively exaggerated scare-mongering. Given that Mr. Foer is so worried about the prospect of the tech companies eliminating free will, for instance, it seems overblown for him to claim that they are also “destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation.” I am a satisfied user of many internet services, but no one has destroyed my ability to switch off notifications on my smartphone and contemplate whatever I want to. To argue otherwise, as Mr. Foer does, is to assume that we are helpless machines without volition. And on the book’s last page the author even seems to change his mind: “The contemplative life remains freely available to us.” Which comes as a pleasant relief, at least until the robots take over.

Mr. Poole is the author of “Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas” and “You Aren’t What You Eat.”

Appeared in the September 13, 2017, print edition.