Supremacy of Big Tech

 

The rise of Big Tech and the fall of the fourth estate, and its effects on democracy. Franklin Foer, a former editor of US political magazine the New Republic, highlights the Tech Company’s monopoly power and its ability to influence election outcomes and its capture of our brain space, and all this have become an existential threat, economically, politically and culturally. He has hired and fired Chris Hughes, an early Facebook employee who bought the publication as a vanity project in 2012. The Big Tech, Silicon Valley billionaires and its disciples are greedy capitalists with disturbing liberal streaks. Google who hired quants from Wall Street to help it control and monetise as much user data as possible said: “Don’t Be Evil”.

Foer catalogues how the largest platform companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook act as natural monopolies, raised on artificial intelligence and their founder’s personal goals and aspirations are dystopian. The Google Brain project involved in the acquisition of  London-based DeepMind, a builder of neural networks that can teach themselves and replicate. The Silicon Valley of Titans, believe their tech utopia is superior with no government intervention, no lifespans and no checks on capitalism. According to Foer, the tech titans want to throw out the bum politicians and replace them with engineers.

Even now there are places like China where most of the political elites are technocrats. Mark Zuckerberg would like you to believe that Facebook is giving “ every person a voice”, but in reality, they are hyper-focused advertising businesses whose main raw material is you. He also points out that the largest tech businesses being attention seekers rather than innovators. This has big societal implications, as Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon, who found that “ a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”, which leaves room for YouTube videos and Trump political journalism.

Foer suggests us to rethink of anti-trust law to the creation of a kind similar to Food and Drug Administration to regulate the Big Tech, are worth considering.

 World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer, Cape £ 18.99/ Penguin $27, 272 pages.