Is Big Tech An Existential Threat?

Tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have revolutionized our lives, connecting us in ways that were once unimaginable — to each other, to information, and to entertainment. Conventional wisdom leads us to believe that the technologies unleashed by these corporations have empowered us as individuals. But is that really the case?

In World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, a powerful critique of the role these companies play in our economy and in our lives, Franklin Foer argues that the success of these tech juggernauts, with their gate-keeping control over our access to the world's information, has created a new form of dangerous monopoly in American life. Does our infatuation with the technological wonders these companies offer distract us from the price we pay as a society in terms of surrendered privacy, intellectual property rights, and diversity of worldviews? Is our sense of individual empowerment merely an algorithm-fed illusion?

Join Future Tense and the New America Fellows Program for a discussion of World Without Mind and the role these big tech companies play in our lives.

This event will be livestreamed on this page. Follow the conversation online with #FTBigTech and @FutureTenseNow.

Moderator:

Andrés Martinez, @andresDCmtz
Editorial Director, Future Tense

Participants:

Franklin Foer, @FranklinFoer
Correspondent, The Atlantic
2016 New America Fellow 
Author, How Soccer Explains the World and World Without Mind

Emily Parker, @emilydparker
Author, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground
Future Tense Fellow, New America

Adam Thierer, @AdamThierer
Senior Research Fellow with the Technology Policy Program, Mercatus Center at George Mason University 

Anne-Marie Slaughter, @SlaughterAM
President and CEO, New America

Copies of Franklin Foer's World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech will be available for purchase by credit card or check.