Long ago I read the fable about a boy who discovered a magic spool of thread. When he pulled the thread, the “boring” days and weeks and months of his youth sped by as if they were mere seconds. Thrilled that he no longer had to experience the mundane, he began pulling on the thread more and more so he only experienced the most exciting, meaningful events. But one day, the thread ran out, and the boy—suddenly an old man—realized he had lived an empty, thoughtless, and ultimately meaningless life. While the magic thread had let him breeze through his years with no uncertainty, pain, or reflection, it had robbed him of those immaterial things that make life rich and valuable.
Consider the possibility that in 2017, the “magic thread” goes by another name: the internet. Such is the thesis of journalist Franklin Foer in World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. World without Mind advances a sharp but increasingly compelling proposal, that the digitization of Western life—especially the digitization engineered by tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook—represents not just an epochal landmark in accessibility and convenience, but an outright assault on things that matter much more.
Like the spool of thread in the fable, Foer believes the internet age has collapsed our lives in the name of streamlining them, and that surrendering more power in the public square to massive technopolies, in exchange for innovation and ease, will have grievous consequences in our culture. Read More
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