UNTIL RECENTLY, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations. Any third grader could describe their essence. Exxon sells oil; McDonald’s makes hamburgers; Walmart is a place to buy stuff. This is no longer so. The ascendant monopolies of today aspire to encompass all of existence. Some of these companies have named themselves for their limitless aspirations. Amazon, as in the most voluminous river on the planet, has a logo that points from A to Z; Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities.
Where do these companies begin and end? Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow. Google now aims to build driverless cars, manufacture phones, and conquer death. Amazon was once content being “the everything store,” but now produces television shows, designs drones, and powers the cloud. The most ambitious tech companies—throw Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple into the mix—are in a race to become our “personal assistant.” They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through the day, and never quite leave our sides. They aspire to become the repository for precious and private items, our calendar and contacts, our photos and documents. They intend for us to unthinkingly turn to them for information and entertainment, while they build unabridged catalogs of our intentions and aversions. Google Glass and the Apple Watch prefigure the day when these companies implant their artificial intelligence within our bodies.
More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. They believe that they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine—to redirect the trajectory of human evolution. How do I know this? Such suggestions are fairly commonplace in Silicon Valley, even if much of the tech press is too obsessed with covering the latest product launch to take much notice of them. In annual addresses and townhall meetings, the founding fathers of these companies often make big, bold pronouncements about human nature—a view of human nature that they intend to impose on the rest of us.
There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, which isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there. But if you listen hard to the titans of tech, that’s not the worldview that emerges. In fact, it is something much closer to the opposite of a libertarian’s veneration of the heroic, solitary individual. The big tech companies believe we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole. By stitching the world together, they can cure its ills. Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality—to the empowerment of the “user”—but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling, a passive, bureaucratic description of us.
The big tech companies—the Europeans have charmingly, and correctly, lumped them together as GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon)—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. When it comes to the most central tenet of individualism—free will—the tech companies have a different way. They hope to automate the choices, both large and small, that we make as we float through the day. It’s their algorithms that suggest the news we read, the goods we buy, the path we travel, the friends we invite into our circle.
It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier. But we’ve spent too long marveling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our own role in determining the human path. Once we cross certain thresholds—once we transform the values of institutions, once we abandon privacy—there’s no turning back, no restoring our lost individuality.
• • •
OVER THE GENERATIONS, we’ve been through revolutions like this before. Back so many years ago, we delighted in the wonders of television dinners and the other newfangled foods that suddenly filled our kitchens: plastic-encased slices of cheese, oozing pizzas that emerged from a crust of ice, bags of crunchy tater tots. In the history of man, these seemed breakthrough innovations. Time-consuming tasks—shopping for ingredients; each of those tedious steps in a recipe, with their trail of collaterally crusted pots and pans—were suddenly and miraculously consigned to history.
The revolution in cuisine wasn’t just enthralling. It was transformational. New products embedded themselves deeply in everyday life, so much so that it took decades for us to understand the price we paid for their convenience, efficiency, and abundance. These foods were feats of engineering all right—but they were engineered to make us fat. Their delectable taste required massive quantities of sodium and sizable stockpiles of lipids, which happened to reset our pallets and made it harder to sate hunger. It took vast new quantities of meat and corn to fabricate these dishes, a spike in demand that re-created the very essence of American agriculture and exacted a terrible environmental toll. A whole new system of industrial farming emerged, with penny-conscious conglomerates cramming chickens into feces-covered pens and stuffing them full of antibiotics. By the time we came to understand the consequences of our revised patterns of consumption, the damage had been done to our waistline, longevity, soul, and planet.
Something like the midcentury food revolution is now reordering the production and consumption of knowledge. Our intellectual habits are being scrambled by the dominant firms. Just as Nabisco and Kraft wanted to change how we eat and what we eat, Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read. The biggest tech companies are, among other things, the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to sort the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.
Such dominance endows these companies with the ability to remake the markets they control. As with the food giants, the big tech companies have given rise to a new science that aims to construct products that pander to the tastes of their consumers. They want to overhaul the entire chain of cultural production, so that they can capture greater profit. Intellectuals, freelance writers, investigative journalists, and midlist novelists are the analog to the family farmers, who have always struggled but simply can’t compete in this transformed economy.
In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. Monopoly is the danger that a powerful firm will use its dominance to squash the diversity of competition. Conformism is the danger that one of those monopolistic firms, intentionally or inadvertently, will use its dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization. With food, we only belatedly understood this pattern.
• • •
I WASN’T ALWAYS SO SKEPTICAL. At my first job, I would eat lunch staring at the Berlin Wall, its impressive thickness, all of its divots and bruises. The wall had defined the impenetrable boundary of an empire; now it casually decorated a new center of power in the world. This section of the wall belonged to Bill Gates and it resided in Microsoft’s cafeteria.
My career in journalism began at Gates’s software company. Microsoft had just built a new campus—centered on a quad, with a stream running through it—in the suburbs of Seattle to house all of its newly launched media. The company had created a women’s magazine called Underwire (wonder why that one failed), an automotive magazine, and other sites devoted to urban life. After graduating from college, I flew west to be the low person on the masthead at a new outlet called Slate, which would become Microsoft’s higher-brow, general interest offering.
These early efforts at Internet journalism were exhilarating. Our readers absorbed us on screens, which suggested a need for different styles of writing. But of what sort? We were no longer constrained by the mail and the printing press, so how often would we publish? Daily? Hourly? All of the conventions of writing felt thrillingly up for grabs.
As with so many aspects of the Internet, Microsoft had misjudged the shape of things to come. Microsoft tried to refashion itself as a state-of-the art media company, but its efforts were clunky and expensive. It made the mistake of actually producing editorial content. Its successors—Facebook, Google, Apple—didn’t repeat that error. They surpassed Microsoft by adapting a revolutionary approach: the domination of media without hiring writers and editors, without owning much of anything.
Over the decades, the Internet revolutionized reading patterns. Instead of beginning with the home pages for Slate or the New York Times, a growing swath of readers now encounters articles through Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple. Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news through social media, and most of it via Facebook; a third of all traffic to media sites flows from Google. This has placed media in a state of abject financial dependence on tech companies. To survive, media companies lost track of their values. Even journalists of the highest integrity have internalized a new mind-set; they worry about how to successfully pander to Google’s and Facebook’s algorithms. In pursuit of clicks, some of our nation’s most important purveyors of news have embraced sensationalism; they have published dubious stories; they have heaped attention on propagandists and conspiracists, one of whom was elected president of the United States. Facebook and Google have created a world where the old boundaries between fact and falsehood have eroded, where misinformation spreads virally.
I experienced an industrial-strength version of this narrative. Most of my career was spent at the New Republic—a little magazine based in Washington, always with fewer than one hundred thousand subscribers, devoted to politics and literature. We sputtered our way through the convulsions of the Internet era, until Chris Hughes bought the magazine in 2012. Chris wasn’t just a savior; he was a face of the zeitgeist. At Harvard, Chris had roomed with Mark Zuckerberg, who had anointed him one of the first employees of Facebook. Chris gave our fusty old magazine a millennial imprimatur, a bigger budget, and an insider’s knowledge of social media. We felt as if we carried the hopes of journalism, which was yearning for a dignified solution to all that ailed it. Chris hired me to edit the New Republic—a position I had held once before—and we began to remake the magazine, setting out to fulfill our own impossibly high expectations.
In the end, those expectations were too much for us to sustain. We couldn’t move quickly enough to suit Chris. Our traffic boomed, but not exponentially. We never sufficiently mastered social media, in his view. My relationship with Chris frayed disastrously. He fired me after two and a half years—a bust-up interpreted widely as a parable of Silicon Valley’s failure to understand the journalistic world over which it now exerted so much influence. There’s no doubt that this experience informs the argument of this book.
I hope this book doesn’t come across as fueled by anger, but I don’t want to deny my anger either. 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. They have eroded the integrity of institutions—media, publishing—that supply the intellectual material that provokes thought and guides democracy. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it.
The companies have already succeeded in their goal of altering human evolution. We’ve all become a bit cyborg. Our phone is an extension of our memory; we’ve outsourced basic mental functions to algorithms; we’ve handed over our secrets to be stored on servers and mined by computers. 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.