A timely and powerful must-read on how the big tech companies are damaging our culture - and what we can do to fight their influence
Franklin Foer is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation. For seven years, he edited The New Republic magazine.He is the author of How Football Explains the World, which has been translated into 27 languages and won a National Jewish Book Award. He has been called one of America's 'most influential liberal journalists' by The Daily Beast. He lives in Washington, D.C.
World Without Mind is an argument in the spirit of those brave
democracy protestors who stand alone before tanks. Franklin Foer
asks us to unplug and think. He asks us to recognize and challenge
Silicon Valley’s monopoly power. His book is a vital response to
digital utopianism at a time when we desperately need new ethics
for social media.
*Steve Coll*
A provocative, enlightening, and above all, important book that is
asking the most important question of our times. It is nothing less
than an examination of the future of humanity and what we like to
call ‘free will.’ It is also a good read – Foer writes with an
engaging vibrancy that makes the book a page-turner.
*Tim Wu*
Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind is a fascinating biography of
the biggest players in big tech – a handful of humans that, through
their decisions, govern the lives of seven billion tech consumers.
Foer shows that these decisions are robbing us of our humanity, our
values, and our ability to grapple with complexity. World Without
Mind is an important and urgent book that should be required
reading for anyone who’s ever shopped on Amazon, swiped the screen
on an Apple device, or scrolled through the Facebook newsfeed – in
short, for all of us.
*Adam Alter*
As the dust settles from the great tech upheavals of the early 21st
century, it turns out that the titans of Silicon Valley have not
ushered us into a utopia of peace and freedom. Instead, as Foer so
convincingly shows, by monopolizing the means of distribution, they
have systematically demonetized and degraded the written word.
World without Mind makes a passionate, deeply informed case for the
need to take back culture – knowledge, information, ideas – from
the Facebooks and Amazons. Its message could not be more
timely.
*William Deresiewicz*
Essential reading - while we still know what reading is - Foer's
terrifying analysis of the cyber state we're in is both portrait
gallery of the robber barons, the monopolists, the tax dodgers and
the fantasists who own the data troughs from which we feed, and
passionate plea for the retention of those values of privacy,
nonconformity, contemplation, creativity and mind, which the Big
Tech companies are well on their way to destroying, not out of
cynicism but the deepest ignorance of what a person is and why
individuality is indispensable to him. This book leaves us in no
doubt: no greater threat to our humanity exists.
*Howard Jacobson*
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