Is Big Tech An Existential Threat?

Tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have revolutionized our lives, connecting us in ways that were once unimaginable — to each other, to information, and to entertainment. Conventional wisdom leads us to believe that the technologies unleashed by these corporations have empowered us as individuals. But is that really the case?

In World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, a powerful critique of the role these companies play in our economy and in our lives, Franklin Foer argues that the success of these tech juggernauts, with their gate-keeping control over our access to the world's information, has created a new form of dangerous monopoly in American life. Does our infatuation with the technological wonders these companies offer distract us from the price we pay as a society in terms of surrendered privacy, intellectual property rights, and diversity of worldviews? Is our sense of individual empowerment merely an algorithm-fed illusion?

Future Tense and the New America Fellows Program held a discussion of World Without Mind and the role these big tech companies play in our lives on October 5, 2017. 

Featured speakers included Franklin Foer, Correspondent, The Atlantic, 2016 New America Fellow, Author, How Soccer Explains the World and World Without Mind; Emily Parker, Author, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground, Future Tense Fellow, New America; Adam Thierer, Senior Research Fellow with the Technology Policy Program, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America. Moderated by Andrés Martinez, Editorial Director, Future Tense.