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 America 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 worldview? Is our sense of individual empowerment merely an algorithm-fed illusion? 

Join Future Tense for a conversation with Franklin Foer and Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg to discuss World Without Mind and the role of these new technologies in our lives.

PARTICIPANTS

Author, How Soccer Explains the World and World Without Mind

Jacob Weisberg @Jacobwe
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, Slate Group

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

Future Tense is a partnership of New America, Arizona State University, and Slate magazine.