A dream of oneness and permanent connection fuels their desire for total monopolies. And it is that danger Foer confronts as he details not just the business ambitions but the screwy philosophies that animate the empires of Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and all of Silicon Valley's oligarchs. In our present age of Russian news bots and Facebook-filtered politics, Brin's musing about a jacked-in supplement to human intelligence sounds more than naive it sounds deeply dangerous. Or so goes the argument in Franklin Foer's lucid and ambitious new book, World Without Mind, which paints a grim portrait of intellectual life in an online world.īack in 2005, Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, told a journalist, "Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain." Happy day. Of course, all that has already happened. How might we go about ravaging our mental landscape? We might begin by cheering while ascendant tech monopolies claim more and more of the public sphere we might allow our attitudes and tastes to then be moulded by those monopolies we might stand by while privacy collapses, authorship is disregarded and intellectual property goes undefended we might watch choices become automated and lives become directed by algorithms we might allow Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon to concentrate their powers to such a degree that divergent conversations, idiosyncratic ideas, become like so many Davids against a few Goliaths in the cloud.
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