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World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech Paperback – September 11, 2018

4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 545 ratings

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A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 One of the best books of the year by The New York Times, LA Times, and NPR

Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence.


Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection—a world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being coopted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success. 
 
Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science—from Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stewart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley—Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life. By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide.

At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They’re monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Important and incredibly informative (and entertaining) new book . . . I can’t recommend this enough . . . I want everyone to go out and get World Without Mind.” —Hugh Hewitt

“But Foer’s writing is deft enough to make this a polemic in the best sense of the word, which is to say a relentless intellectual argument, executed in the tradition of George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, which often eschews nuance in favor of wit and aggression.” —
Washington Post

“Foer conjures concise, insightful psychological profiles of each mover-and-shaker, detailing how they've mixed utopianism and monopolism into an insidious whole. He also offers compelling mini-bios of everyone from Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and the father of modern propaganda, to Stewart Brand, publisher of
The Whole Earth Catalog and a massive influence on Silicon Valley. . . . World Without Mind is a searing take, a polemic packed with urgency and desperation that, for all its erudition and eloquence, is not afraid to roll up its sleeves and make things personal.” —NPR.org

“When the author Franklin Foer first raised concerns about Silicon Valley’s power players, ‘people looked at me funny’. Now his work appears prophetic.”
The Guardian

“Lucid and ambitious new book . . . Foer is smart and trenchant when he attacks.”
Globe and Mail

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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and Private Empire
 
“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, author of The Attention Merchants and The Master Switch
 
“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, New York Times bestselling author of Excellent Sheep and A Jane Austen Education
 
“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, New York Times bestselling author of Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink

“Essential readingwhile we still know what reading isFoer'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, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Dog’s Last Walk and The Finkler Question

About the Author

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Last Politician and How Soccer Explains the World. For seven years, he edited The New Republic.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 11, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101981121
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101981122
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.48 x 0.72 x 8.41 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 545 ratings

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Customers find the book insightful and revealing. They describe it as an excellent, worthwhile read with well-written prose that is easy to understand. Readers appreciate the author's talent and consider the book a great value for money.

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30 customers mention "Insight"26 positive4 negative

Customers find the book insightful and hard to put down. They say it starts with a great thought-provoking premise and provides a lot of information and history to mull over. The book is described as important for our times, revealing, and sobering at times. Readers appreciate the author's ability to synthesize complex ideas, historical underpinnings, and a good analysis of modern capitalism in the U.S.

"...All in all, a superb book which makes you stop on every page to think, an activity for which there is little time or inclination on the internet." Read more

"...As Foer documents in his engaging and smart polemic, they were not motivated by an evil desire for control but by a craving for knowledge, community..." Read more

"...He explains how we got where we are today. An eye opener and confirmation..." Read more

"Good book with up to date information that anyone who uses digital tech (guess thats pretty much everyone these days) should be aware of...." Read more

23 customers mention "Readability"23 positive0 negative

Customers find the book readable and engaging. They say it's an important read about the dangers of Amazon, Google, and Facebook vying for control of free content. The book is described as well-researched and a masterpiece that anyone needs to read.

"...Foer’s main subject is writing. A serious book takes time, lots of time, in research, thought, writing and revising...." Read more

"Foer is a good writer and this was an easy, enjoyable read. I find myself agreeing with many of the author's observations and concerns...." Read more

"...as some will certainly refer to him, is that the book is meticulously researched and any reader is sure to learn things about the history of..." Read more

"Good book with up to date information that anyone who uses digital tech (guess thats pretty much everyone these days) should be aware of...." Read more

12 customers mention "Writing quality"9 positive3 negative

Customers find the writing quality good and easy to understand. They describe it as well-written, thoughtful, and tackling an important topic.

"Foer is a good writer and this was an easy, enjoyable read. I find myself agreeing with many of the author's observations and concerns...." Read more

"...An extremely well written book, easy to understand while at the same time reminding us how little of our incredible language repository we actually..." Read more

"...Also, the writing style becomes suddenly very colloquial at times, which detracts for the smoothness of the read...." Read more

"...to like it more; it’s not a bad book and he’s a very talented writer tackling an important topic, but it never quite rises above his personal sense..." Read more

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2020
    Foer surveys the history of media, meaning not only writing, though that’s the subject he knows best, but all the arts. These are distinguished from other pursuits by the lack of opportunity for productivity enhancement. New technology can make it cheaper to manufacture a shovel, or a car, than it was yesterday. But if two hundred years ago it took four accomplished musicians twenty minutes to perform a Beethoven quartet, today it still takes four accomplished musicians twenty minutes to perform that Beethoven quartet. In fact, it’s worse today, much worse, since people who want to hear a Beethoven quartet can buy a recording of it and listen to it over and over again without paying anything more than the original purchase price, an opportunity not available in Beethoven’s time, and pretty much ruinous to the prospects of a newly formed string quartet today.

    Foer’s main subject is writing. A serious book takes time, lots of time, in research, thought, writing and revising. Some subjects may also involve travel – for my book on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, published by Harcourt Brace in the US and Sir Isaac Pitman in Britain and commonwealth countries, I visited libraries and places of pertinent interest in England, Germany, Belgium, and Israel, as well as at Yale and Harvard (as I had been a student at both schools, I had free access to their libraries, an outsider would have had to pay hefty fees). Those activities are not subject to significant increases in productivity. (Using a word processing program can save time over a typewriter when doing revisions, but in the overall production of a book this is not significant.)

    For many years, a professional writer could make a decent living at his craft but, Foer argues, the internet in general, and Amazon in particular, has put paid to those days. I should add that this is not as new a phenomenon as Foer seems to suggest. My total payments for my Peace Conference book barely covered my out-of-pocket expenses; add my labor, and it was a losing proposition. (Fortunately, I did not depend upon writing to make a living; had I so depended, I and my family would have starved.) Nevertheless, Foer’s portrayal of the plight of the professional writer today is nothing short of devastating. What that means, of course, and this is a major theme of this book, is that writing as a profession is finished, over, done; and that means that the quality of what is written can only decline and is, in fact, declining. Take this a step further and you can envision the collapse of Western civilization as we have known it since the Enlightenment, and Foer is hardly the only scholar to suggest that that is exactly what we are witnessing.

    Actually, Foer casts his net much wider than that, though that would seem pretty wide. His survey includes Descartes, Leibniz, Orwell, Justice Brandeis, and many others famous and lesser known. Towards the end of this book, he tackles the antitrust laws as a bulwark against the overwhelming power of Amazon, Facebook, and Google. It is certainly true that if competition is the lifeblood of capitalism, then the failure to enforce antitrust laws puts capitalism on life support. But in fact, the antitrust laws have been dead letter for a long time. (Yes, I know Google is being looked into under these long moribund laws. We’ll see how that goes.)

    All in all, a superb book which makes you stop on every page to think, an activity for which there is little time or inclination on the internet.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2019
    Foer is a good writer and this was an easy, enjoyable read. I find myself agreeing with many of the author's observations and concerns. Tech is powerful, and demands a watchful eye. I do not agree with the author's appeal to big government regulation, as though one evil is better than another, nor do I see government as the benevolent force that the author does.

    "When government uses its power to achieve clear moral ends, it has a strong record," Foer asserts. Right. That depends on one's vantage. Government has presided over the deaths of untold millions of babies over and against the will of the electorate, as it has similarly redefined marriage biology, and family to suit it's whims. It has had a brief love affair with eugenics and killed 750,000 of its own to preserve its absolute authority. I would consider this more of a "mixed bag" of moral judgments. Government does best when it is close to the people and worst when remote.

    The author is also guilty of equivocation on the term "monopoly." He never defines the term and uses roughly as any company achieving significant dominance in the marketplace. This just won't do. As dominant as Facebook and Amazon are, they are by no means monopolies. They are vulnerable to competitors just as Microsoft and IBM have been in the past.

    Foer does ultimately concede that hope lies in human agency and in this I think he is right. As Chesterton said, any dead thing can go with the stream, only a live thing can go against it.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2017
    “World Without Mind” is an important, impassioned book that should be required reading for anyone who owns an iPhone or Android, or has a Facebook, Google, or Amazon account.

    Thirty years ago, college campuses were alive with protest and rebellion. It wasn’t anything like the sixties, but students still embraced the spirit of freedom and insisted on personal choice. The most political camped out in makeshift shantytowns demanding divestiture from South Africa and organized Take Back the Night marches. If a prophetess had appeared and told them that by the time their children were living in dorm rooms they’d be happily tracking their children’s every move via a smartphone app, buying clothing, books, and music recommended by the world’s largest and most secretive corporations, and voluntarily giving those corporations their most sensitive documents and precious memories for safekeeping—those students would not have believed her.

    Foer is not a modern-day Cassandra predicting a dystopian future. Rather, he is a veteran journalist whose book “World Without Mind,” describes the world we already live in, but whose power dynamics we have, as a species, almost unanimously failed to grasp. The consequences for continuing to Snapchat and Facebook IM our lives away in blissful ignorance are likely to be profoundly disturbing, but they are also easy to avert.

    In one of history’s most ironic twists, the students who were most equipped to rage against the machine—the best and the brightest and the most technologically savvy—spent the sixties, seventies and eighties preparing the ground for the growth of the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen. As Foer documents in his engaging and smart polemic, they were not motivated by an evil desire for control but by a craving for knowledge, community, and connection. Unfortunately for humanity, their motivations did not matter. The power of the tools they build did.

    The Trojan horse of corporate control is now inside our gates. It has replicated a billion times and shape-shifted into tools we use hundreds of times a day without thinking. In many cases, a message delivered by one of the four big tech companies is the first thing an ordinary person looks at when they wake up and the last thing they consult before they fall asleep.

    It might sound like Foer is against technology. But “World Without Mind” is not a call to revert to a less-connected, pre-Internet age. Foer does not advise throwing away your smartphone and deleting your Facebook account. What he advocates is informed consent fueled by an understanding of the agendas of the biggest technology firms and what they will do to achieve them. The bulk of his book is an engaging discussion of the ideology behind and the motivations of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, with fascinating digressions into Descartes' view of automata, Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph key, and how the 1891 copyright law transformed writing from a hobby into a profession.

    “It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier,” Foer says. “But we’ve spent too long marveling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our role in determining our human path.”
    130 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • scifi friend
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great read.
    Reviewed in Canada on May 3, 2019
    Offers some interesting and insightful thoughts on the state of big tech, how we got here and some ideas about how we might mitigate some of the damage.
  • Felipe Nobrega Rodrigues
    5.0 out of 5 stars Must read
    Reviewed in Brazil on May 16, 2018
    O livro descortina toda manipulacao e males para a democracia que grandes empresas de tecnologia fizeram nos ultimos 10 anos. Melhor livro do ano, sem duvida!
  • Elvis
    2.0 out of 5 stars Book Without Sense
    Reviewed in Germany on January 14, 2019
    Imagine asking an important question on the internet about new technologies and internet and how they affect our lives and then getting a typical internet response from someone who at first describes his own life an then tries to throw irrelevant historical information in order to sound more educated. Of course he tries to connect this historical information with one or two sentences that somehow relate to your question. He does not want anybody to suspect that he does not really have an educated argument with a lot of self critique. And then, at the very end, he writes - "There are moments when we all seem to agree on this point. The election of Donald Trump came with the shock of collective recognition that our media culture has decayed..."

    I don't want to waste your time disproving authors naive arguments and his lack of education about the technology. If you want to read better books about this sort of stuff, look up Nicholas Carr. The Glass Cage and the Shallows were definitely better than this one even if I disagree with Carr he at least had the capacity to present the facts and his case right and in a single narrative.
  • Davide Solaroli
    5.0 out of 5 stars A book for our times
    Reviewed in Italy on November 30, 2018
    We are going through great changes with the digital era in a deep way that we are not fully aware of. This book is good tool to understand the means and what's behind daily actions that we take for granted and natural, but that are not.
  • Rohinton
    5.0 out of 5 stars Good.
    Reviewed in India on February 10, 2018
    A good read.