Quotes from Franklin Foer

Magazines and newspapers used to think of themselves as something coherent--an issue, an edition, an institution. Not as the publisher of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

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.

There was a more personal form of fragmentation that plagued postwar America, too—a sense that all the paper-pushing and file cabinets had divided workers from their creativity, rendering them miserable, isolated automatons.

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.

There can be only one global village. These structures were the greatest business opportunities ever imagined—and only the innocence of faith could blind one to the possibility that they would fall into the hands of big firms.

Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: "What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it.

Like nineteenth-century European powers, each company does little to impinge on the other's sphere of influence, competing only on the fringes of empire.

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

we're constantly watched and always distracted

The sale wasn't seen as just a transition in ownership regimes; it was a dying elite handing over power to an ascendant one

a dominant class enforces rules about what is and is not acceptable. It defines good art, good food, good books—and creates an exclusionary vocabulary for describing them

But if you wanted to replicate the working of the human brain, you had to intimately understand your model. AI, in other words, required psychology. The engineers read Freud, just like the literary critics—and reinterpreted him for their own purposes. They debated Chomsky about the nature of the mind.

Carl Page had his own idea about how to go about it. He posited that procedures contained in Robert's Rules of Order, a late-nineteenth-century manual for running effective meetings, could provide the basis for building AI.

When Page describes Google reshaping the future of humanity, this isn't simply a description of the convenience it provides; what it aims to redirect is the course of evolution, in the Darwinian sense of the word. It's not too grandiose to claim that they are attempting to create a superior species, a species that transcends our natural form.

Descartes had somehow managed to use skepticism in service of orthodoxy; he preserved crucial shards of church doctrine—the immortal soul, for starters—while buying intellectual space for the physical sciences to continue the march toward knowledge.

Philosophy couldn't emancipate the mind, but technology just might. 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.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow.

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.

The mathematicians and engineers may have disavowed the existence of God, but they placed themselves in a celestial role of giving life to a pile of inorganic material. And it changed them.

world in which we're constantly watched and always distracted.

Arkan had threatened to shoot a rival striker's kneecap if he scored against Obilic.

Journalism was vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the justification for such fanaticism about building a thick, tall wall between the two. The fear was that we'd enter a world where readers couldn't tell the difference between editorial and advertising—where the corrupt hand of advertisers would interfere with the journalistic search for truth. Those fears are in the process of being realized.

Hackers, he told one interviewer, were "just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible. That's what I try to encourage our engineers to do here." To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible Facebook citizen—a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service of conformism.