In World Without Mind, journalist Franklin Foer identifies three distinct but overlapping threats posed by Silicon Valley. The first, and most sensational, is the product of the utopian dreams of the tech gurus, who imagine that infallible algorithms can be used to replace fallible human judgments, ushering in a world where supposedly free choices have been eliminated in favor of mechanical, "scientific" decision-making. The second, and most dear to the author, is the destruction of the old media by the new, particularly the near-death of quality journalism and the rise of click-bait which is tailored to attract the maximum number of views by gaming the algorithms which determine what people "want" to see. The third is the bridge between the first two, the domination of our media and economic consumption by a few monopolistic corporations that attempt, as much as possible and more than we might like to imagine, to make our decisions for us.
It is easy to dismiss World Without Mind as the nostalgic whine of a loser in the tech race, a journalist who, like many before him, found that progress had rendered him irrelevant. This is not helped by the fact that Foer is himself a prisoner of Whig history, freely bandying about cliched nonsense like "We consider conformism to be spiritually and morally deadening." At one point he flatly asserts that "when writing was professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the culture deepened," without support or explanation and against the plain evidence of our senses. It is ameliorated somewhat by his open admission that he has several axes to grind. More importantly, his prescription that, in tandem with the use of antitrust laws to break up Big Tech, ordinary people begin to treat their independence from technology as a health issue even as they flaunt it as a status symbol, an approach consciously modelled after the remarkably successful healthy eating and organic food movements, is at least interesting. It is, however, sadly reminiscent of similar attempts to wean Americans from their TVs, and cynics will be quick to suggest that it lacks the organic food craze's feature of being something big corporations can easily profit from indulging.
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