World Without Mind

1. Big Tech's Monopoly Aspirations Threaten Individuality

More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it.

Spiritual yearning for monopoly. Silicon Valley's biggest companies don't merely crave monopoly as a matter of profit; its pundits and theorists don't merely tolerate gigantism as a fact of economic life. In the great office parks south of San Francisco, monopoly is a spiritual yearning, a concept unabashedly embraced. Big tech considers the concentration of power in its companies—in the networks they control—an urgent social good, the precursor to global harmony, a necessary condition for undoing the alienation of humankind.

Counterculture roots. This craving for monopoly stretches back to the counterculture of the 1960s, where it emerged from lyrical visions of peace and love. Stewart Brand, a crown prince of hippiedom, believed technology could heal the world and bring humanity together. This dream, handed down through ages in Silicon Valley, has become the basis for monopoly in the hands of Facebook and Google, a pretext for domination.

Erosion of individuality. The big tech companies are shredding the principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their hostility to intellectual property. In the realm of economics, they justify monopoly with their well-articulated belief that competition undermines our pursuit of the common good and ambitious goals.

2. Google's AI-Driven Mission Echoes Historical Attempts to Transcend Human Limitations

If we solve search that means you can answer any question, which means you can do basically anything.

AI as a theological pursuit. At the epicenter of Google’s bulging portfolio is one master project: The company wants to create machines that replicate the human brain, and then advance beyond. Taking on this grandiose assignment, Google stands to transform life on the planet, precisely as it boasted it would. The laws of man are a mere nuisance that can only slow down such work.

Descartes's influence. Google is trying solve a problem that first emerged several centuries ago, amid the blazing battle between the entrenched church and the emerging science. It’s a project that originated with modern philosophy itself and the figure of René Descartes. Descartes believed that the human casing contains a divine instrument that elevates humankind above the animal kingdom. Inside our mortal hardware, the “prison of the body,” as Descartes called it, resides the software of mind.

The singularity. Google has set out to succeed where Descartes failed, except that it has jettisoned all the philosophical questions that rattled around in his head. Where Descartes emphasized skepticism and doubt, Google is never plagued by second-guessing. It has turned the liberation of the brain into an engineering challenge—an exercise that often fails to ask basic questions about the human implications of the project.

3. Facebook's Algorithms Aim to Shape Behavior, Raising Concerns About Free Will

To get people to this point where there’s more openness—that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it.

Transparency of individuals. Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of governments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of individuals—or what it has called, at various moments, “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency.” The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. Even if we don’t intend for our secrets to become public knowledge, their exposure will improve society.

Algorithms and control. The precise source of Facebook’s power is algorithms. Facebook’s algorithm couldn’t be more opaque. The algorithm interprets more than one hundred thousand “signals” to make its decisions about what users see. Some of these signals apply to all Facebook users; some reflect users’ particular habits and the habits of their friends.

Erosion of free will. Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction.

4. Amazon's Dominance Disrupts Knowledge Production and Undermines Authorship

No technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

Knowledge monopolies. Amazon didn’t just create the world’s biggest bookstore; it made its store far more usable, far more efficient, than browsing the aisles of a Barnes and Noble or cruising a library’s card catalog. And beyond that, Amazon anticipated your desires, using its storehouse of data to recommend your next purchase, to strongly suggest a course for navigating knowledge.

Deflating the value of knowledge. Amazon doesn’t quite preach the same gospel, but it shares the same basic approach. It deflated the price of the books that it sells and made implicit arguments about their value. By unilaterally setting the price of the e-book at $9.99, far lower than paper, Bezos falsely implied that the cost of producing a book resided in printing and shipping, not in intellectual capital, creativity, and years of effort.

Remaking the production of culture. Amazon doesn’t just have the power to bring books to the public’s attention, or to deny knowledge to an audience. It wants to radically remake the production of culture. In his most boastful moments Bezos will admit his revolutionary ambitions: “No technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.”

5. The Tech Giants' Gatekeeping Power Shapes Public Opinion and Erodes Democracy

So long as there is interposed between the ordinary citizen and the facts a news organization determining by entirely private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what he shall know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say that the substance of democratic government is secure.

The illusion of neutrality. The tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation, just as Stewart Brand preached. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfill their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and empowering.

The new gatekeepers. Jeff Bezos is the most populist of the tech CEOs, and the most strident critic of gatekeepers among them. But his sniping at the old elite apparently masks a more complicated set of emotions and desires, his own unreconciled attraction to the object of his disdain. Amazon, by contrast, sells nearly every cultural artifact produced by Western civilization. But let’s not confuse Amazon with a utopian experiment in participatory democracy.

The power to influence. The companies preach the gospel of efficiency as they engage in the most extensive surveillance in human history. They are rent-seekers with little regard for the independent producers whose goods they sell. They shape the minds of citizens, filtering the information by which citizens arrive at their political opinions.

6. Dependence on Big Tech Undermines Journalistic Integrity and Promotes Conformity

To survive, media companies lost track of their values.

The lure of traffic. Growing traffic required a new mind-set. Unlike television, the ethos of print journalism shunned the strategic pursuit of audience as a dirty, somewhat corrupting enterprise. Or that pursuit was something best left to the business side, not a concern for writers and editors.

The science of virality. The emerging science of traffic was really a branch of behavioral psychology—people clicked so quickly, they didn’t always fully understand why they gravitated to one piece over another. They were moved by cognitive biases, irrational forces, decisions made in a semiconscious state. So enticing a reader might entail a little manipulation, a little hidden persuasion.

The erosion of values. The engineering mind-set has little patience for the fetishization of words and images, for the mystique of art, for moral complexity and emotional expression. It views humans as data, components of systems, abstractions. That’s why Facebook has so few qualms about performing rampant experiments on its users.

7. The Erosion of Authorship Devalues Creativity and Threatens Intellectual Freedom

The defining feature of the Internet is that it leaves resources free.

The collapse of value. The big tech companies didn’t just benefit from the economic collapse of knowledge. They maneuvered to shred the value of knowledge, so that old media would come to helplessly depend on their platforms. There was a precedent for this strategy. When Apple created the iPod, it created a device with the capacity to hold thousands of digitized songs—ideal for amassing pirated music, which was flowing freely at that moment.

The rise of amateurism. Silicon Valley championed a different theory of creativity. It emphasized the virtues of collaboration. Reid Hoffman, a cofounder of LinkedIn, enthused: “No one can succeed by themselves. . . . The only way you can achieve something magnificent is by working with other people.”

The medieval model. Silicon Valley’s view of creativity is medieval. Europe, in the era before the Enlightenment, didn’t think much of authors. It also belittled originality, although for reasons that bear little resemblance to Lessig’s case. All credit for creativity was due to the divine source of inspiration: “God alone creates,” Thomas Aquinas asserted.

8. Data Collection and Algorithmic Manipulation Pose a Threat to Autonomy

The algorithm is supposed to be devoid of bias, intuition, emotion, or forgiveness.

The power of algorithms. Algorithms have retired many of the bureaucratic, clerical duties once performed by humans—and they will soon begin to replace more creative tasks. At Netflix, algorithms suggest the genres of movies to commission. Some news wires use algorithms to write stories about crime, baseball games, and earthquakes, the most rote journalistic tasks.

The automation of thinking. The engineering mind-set has little patience for the fetishization of words and images, for the mystique of art, for moral complexity and emotional expression. It views humans as data, components of systems, abstractions. That’s why Facebook has so few qualms about performing rampant experiments on its users.

Erosion of free will. Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction.

9. Reclaiming Individuality Requires Resisting Big Tech's Influence and Valuing Contemplation

The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation.

The importance of contemplation. The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted. Through their accumulation of data, they have constructed a portrait of our minds, which they use to invisibly guide mass behavior (and increasingly individual behavior) to further their financial interests.

The need for resistance. What we need to always remember is that we’re not just merging with machines, but with the companies that run the machines. This book is about the ideas that fuel these companies—and the imperative of resisting them.

The power of choice. Human nature is malleable. It’s not some fixed thing, but has a breaking point, a point at which our nature is no longer really human. We might decide to sail happily past that threshold, but we need to be honest about the costs. Right now, we’re not steering our course.

10. A New Data Protection Authority is Needed to Protect Privacy and Promote Competition

Assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order.

The need for regulation. The tech companies have so mastered Washington, they have acquired such cultural prestige, that it’s hard to imagine the system ever restraining them. But we know that politics doesn’t repose in a steady state, and the companies have one gaping vulnerability—they aggressively surveil users.

A Data Protection Authority. What we need is a Data Protection Authority to protect privacy as the government protects the environment. Both the environment and privacy are goods that the market would destroy if left to its own devices. We let business degrade the environment within limits—and we should tolerate the same with privacy.

Protecting autonomy. The intimate details embedded in our data can be used to undermine us; data provides the basis for invisible discrimination; it is used to influence our choices, both our habits of consumption and our intellectual habits. Data provides an X-ray of the soul. Companies turn that photograph of the inner self into a commodity to be traded on a market, bought and sold without our knowledge.

11. The Food Movement Offers a Model for Resisting Homogenization and Valuing Quality in Culture

Eating is a political act.

The food movement as a model. There is a piece of technology hailed as inevitable, almost universally assumed to present consumers with an irresistible choice. It has fallen short of expectations—and in that gap between the hype and reality, we can see the public unconsciously gravitating toward a profound critique, the stirrings of a backlash.

Rejecting the processed. The counterculture combined austere politics with hedonism, ethical righteousness, and corporeal pleasure. Food was in many ways the apotheosis of the movement. In the shadow of all that radicalism, the so-called Gourmet Ghetto flourished in Berkeley.

The power of choice. The culture industries need to present themselves as the organic alternative, a symbol of social status and aspiration. Media must denounce their most recent phase, to lead a rebellion against the processed, ephemeral, speed-based writing encouraged by the tech companies. Subscriptions are the route away from the aisles of clickbait.

Last updated: April 14, 2025