In his new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech," author Franklin Foer addresses some of the key players spearheading the silencing of independent thought online – mainly Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
In Foer's view, after investigating the situation at-length, the major tech giants are currently running a monopolistic police state online that not only influences the type of information that's available to the public, but also how much this information costs to access.
The existing antitrust law, he says, needs to be updated to address this existential threat to free speech and the free flow of information. Ever since it was created back in the 1960s, this law has been "bastardized," he warns, in an effort to maintain total control over the narrative.
"That was my frustration when I went and talked to the Justice Department about Amazon," Foer says about his own efforts to break up the monopoly and restore some semblance of freedom back to the internet and society at large.
"Well, they're actually hurting consumers over the long run by hurting producers. And they're behaving in a bullying sort of way. Maybe not to consumers, but to producers. Why in God's name can't you see the harm? And they just couldn't see it because it was so outside of the current paradigm under which they're operating.
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Tech giants abusing personal data to map human psyches for massive profits, suggests Foer
Unlike Amazon, Facebook and Google's core products are "free," meaning they're offered to users in exchange for behind-the-scenes access to personal data that's bought and sold for profit. But even this is a threat, especially when these two corporations are blatantly violating the law and getting away with it.
"Facebook and Google are constantly organizing things in ways in which we're not really cognizant, and we're not even taught to be cognizant, and most people aren't, and done in a way in which they're leveraging our data," warns Foer.
"Our data is this cartography of the inside of our psyche. They know our weaknesses, and they know the things that give us pleasure and the things that cause us anxiety and anger. They use that information in order to keep us addicted. That makes the companies the enemies of independent thought."
Tech censorship has now gone mainstream – and it's affecting EVERYONE
These are powerful words that need to be said, especially by someone within the "belly of the beast," so to speak, of the mainstream media. By making these facts known via platforms that aren't necessarily "independent," Foer is opening up a whole new audience to the dark reality that control over commerce and information itself have both been monopolized by a handful of tech companies operating out of Silicon Valley.
Soon it won't just be Alex Jones and Infowars that get the axe from these platforms: it'll be everyone who defies the narrative. And that seems to be one of the main points behind Foer's push for something to be done at the regulatory level to stop these tech giants from basically lording their power over the entire world.
The core of the problem is manipulation, says Foer, and "this idea that they're going to be able to manipulate us to engage us for as long as possible, and that other people are going to come in from the outside and take advantage of that, because that's the system that they created."
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