The Art of Manliness - #372： World Without Mind — The Existential Threat of Big Tech

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast during the past

00:00:18.620 decade three companies have revolutionized the way we shop socialize and find information i'm

00:00:23.160 talking of course about amazon facebook and google while these companies have made our lives easier

00:00:27.160 many ways my guest today argues that they're also eroding autonomy and individuality his name is

00:00:31.240 franklin for and he's the author of the book world without mind the existential threat of big tech

00:00:35.240 and today on the show franklin talks about how the utopian ideals of silicon valley have led to an

00:00:39.160 internet that's becoming more and more homogenized and centralized we then dig into the vast amounts

00:00:43.680 of personal information these companies collect about us and how they're using it on us and then

00:00:47.520 franklin argues while these companies make us feel more autonomous they're actually diminishing our

00:00:51.620 choices and reducing our individuality he then provides suggestions on what you can do to maintain

00:00:55.680 your sense of individualism in today's atmosphere after the show's over check out the show notes at

00:01:00.140 aom.is slash world without mind where you find links to resources bring delve deeper into this topic

00:01:05.440 franklin for welcome to the show pleasure so you just published a book world without mind the

00:01:22.100 existential threat of big tech sounds ominous what was what was the impetus behind behind this book

00:01:28.300 yeah it's a wee bit apocalyptic minded i wrote this book i had just gotten fired as editor of the new

00:01:35.420 republic which was an incredibly uh traumatic experience for me i'd worked at the new republic for

00:01:41.560 a really long time and would had just come off this cycle of where the magazine had been bought by

00:01:49.100 chris hughes who was 28 years old worth 700 billion dollars he'd been mark zuckerberg's roommate in

00:01:56.400 college and one of the first really a co-founder of facebook and he'd arrived at the new republic with

00:02:03.220 extremely lofty ambitions he said i share your commitment to serious journalism and the new

00:02:09.440 republic had been was a hundred year old magazine devoted to politics policy

00:02:14.020 in fairly high culture um he said i share your devotion to to seriousness i've got a lot of money

00:02:21.400 and you guys have been struggling to master this digital world well i i co-founded social media so

00:02:28.140 it seemed awesome and for a time it was extremely awesome but then there was a moment where he said look

00:02:36.620 we really need to generate revenue and the only way for us to do that is to produce

00:02:41.920 pieces that will be very successful on facebook and so we live this just super compressed period

00:02:49.080 in media history where we made this transition for being a magazine that prided itself on its

00:02:55.560 originality and its seriousness to a magazine that was trying to pander to the algorithms of facebook

00:03:02.680 trying to produce journalism that would prove to be popular on facebook and so it was it was a it was a

00:03:09.500 really really rushed transition and a new ceo came aboard a guy from yahoo and as soon as he came

00:03:17.840 aboard i kind of knew that i was doomed because it took him two weeks to meet with me anyway so i ended

00:03:23.300 up i ended up realizing that i was about to get fired so i quit and a bunch of other people quit the

00:03:29.720 magazine and it became this object lesson in the media about how silicon valley was swallowing

00:03:35.700 journalism and why that was going bad and that was i it just got me thinking along the lines of the ways in which

00:03:44.700 journalism actually was a case study for the broader world and that everybody in the world is becoming so

00:03:52.140 dependent on these platforms on google on facebook on apple on amazon and uh i i wanted to both uh

00:04:02.700 productively channel my anger and also explore this problem that was it'd been extremely interesting

00:04:10.580 me long before i'd run into trouble at the new republic right and it's kind of uh this idea the sort

00:04:17.880 of the the concern about these tech companies is really hit the zeitgeist because we're seeing it

00:04:22.040 with amazon with facebook especially uh twitter even uh so yeah i mean i feel like it's it's like in

00:04:28.980 the air it's in the social milieu well when i started writing this book actually amazon was the

00:04:34.520 was really my initial impetus just because i had been active in the authors guild which is a group

00:04:40.060 that organizes on behalf of writers and when amazon had been renegotiating its book contracts with the

00:04:46.840 big publishers it was it was applying super brutal tactics and said we dominate this market and basically

00:04:53.500 you have to accept our terms or you're toast and they would strip if a publisher was challenging

00:05:00.340 amazon they would strip the buy button off of its books or they would point readers in other directions

00:05:05.240 and so that was initially the thing that got me interested in these questions but when i did i like

00:05:10.760 i said when i started writing this book people looked at me like i was a hippie howling into the wind

00:05:15.140 these companies had such cultural prestige and by the time my book came out the zeitgeist had already

00:05:21.000 started to shift i think in no small measure thanks to the election and all the questions about facebook

00:05:26.360 that arose out of the election but uh one radio interviewer last week asked me it accused me of

00:05:33.580 mouthing conventional wisdom by criticizing these tech companies i thought wow the zeitgeist really has turned

00:05:40.340 well let's before we get into some of these criticisms i think it's important to understand

00:05:46.460 because it's amazing these companies have just risen to power really fast i think sometimes we

00:05:52.080 take for granted how fast they've come to dominate life our lives but i think to understand how that

00:05:58.320 happened we need to understand the philosophical underpinnings that sure weren't that that exist in

00:06:04.440 silicon valley so what are those underpinnings and what how has that helped them or sort of not help

00:06:09.940 them you know directed how they've managed their businesses to where they're grown to these giant

00:06:15.220 behemoths well one of the totally fascinating uh facts about silicon valley is that it wasn't just

00:06:22.900 the birthplace of apple the internet the personal computer it was also the place where the counterculture

00:06:28.540 came into being so alongside steve jobs you had the grateful dead you had lsd you had the communes

00:06:37.240 and a lot of the spirit of the counterculture rubbed off on technology as technology rubbed off on the

00:06:43.800 spirit of the counterculture and you had in the late 60s and early 70s a bunch of people headed off

00:06:49.900 to uh to communes which was a doom a bit of a doomed experiment but that real spirit of wanting

00:06:57.480 to tie everybody together in a communal sort of way of using technology to try to gin up a different

00:07:05.340 sort of consciousness in the same sort of way that lsd had produced a different sort of consciousness

00:07:09.740 those ideas came to infuse our ideas about technology and one of the most powerful ideas

00:07:16.380 about technology that we have is this idea of stitching the world together into one and creating

00:07:23.880 these massive new mechanisms these these communes really that we can exist in and that in silicon

00:07:31.020 valley that became the basis for the idea of the network which is so ubiquitous or all these ideas

00:07:37.900 about we think of silicon valley as being kind of libertarian which it is to a certain extent but

00:07:42.580 it's also fundamentally collectivist and you see it in the concepts of crowdsourcing social media

00:07:47.920 collaboration and networking and these ideas these networks these these kind of giant communes that

00:07:54.420 they build are beautiful dreams but when they get captured by big firms they become the basis for

00:08:01.140 monopoly yeah i mean i think that that weird tension between libertarian individualism and this utopian

00:08:06.960 collectivism is really weird because you do see it and it's like i feel like the libertarianism and

00:08:12.700 like there's like a few guys it's like well i'm the guy who can create this utopian collective

00:08:18.140 network and so like that they encourage like you know as little regulations as possible so they can

00:08:24.140 achieve that yeah no that's right i mean it's it's there's a way in which they're just asking for

00:08:29.400 libertarianism for themselves and collectivism for everybody else and you see what you're getting at

00:08:35.860 i think is one of the big themes of my book which is that there's there's hypocrisy that runs through

00:08:42.440 a lot of these companies that they they insist on transparency and sharing and everybody else's lives

00:08:48.840 but when it comes to revealing how their algorithms work they're completely opaque or you know facebook is

00:08:56.100 all about sharing but they were so reluctant to share basic information about what russian ads were built

00:09:03.660 were bought during the campaign yeah and i mean so one of the arguments so this collectivist idea of

00:09:08.860 creating a monop like this is their idea of a lot of you hear a lot in silicon valley is monopolies are

00:09:13.740 good yeah so why do they okay you know you grew up in high school learning about how monopolies are

00:09:19.640 terrible you had teddy roosevelt busting the trust what why do they think monopolies are a good thing

00:09:24.740 well i think there's a business principle behind it which is that they believe that the world operates

00:09:33.180 as a series of networks and so you can see this and this is an old idea i mean railroads were networks

00:09:39.920 that tied people together the phone companies operated networks that tied people together facebook is a

00:09:46.640 network that ties people together google is a network that ties people into google and the principle

00:09:54.380 is that these networks work most efficiently when there's only one it just doesn't make sense for there

00:10:00.580 to be since facebook is kind of a global telephone book it doesn't make sense for there to be two global

00:10:05.840 telephone books or it's a mechanism for staying in touch with people around the world well what if what if

00:10:11.700 there were two of them and we we were on it would just be sloppy and so it's the raison d'etre is kind

00:10:17.680 of this idea of oneness the business idea is the one of oneness and so in silicon valley you have the sense

00:10:23.520 that once a firm captures the network it's not even worth competing with them because being second

00:10:31.100 place in the network is just not going to yield a huge financial gain but it is i mean there is a way in

00:10:37.900 which all this is very different than the monopolies of old first is that these guys just possess so much

00:10:45.080 data which is this intimate window inside your head this history of everything that you've read

00:10:51.440 everywhere you've traveled everything that you've bought which is then used to kind of increase your

00:10:57.060 dependence on the network to keep you engaged for as long as possible or you could even see it say to

00:11:02.580 addict you to their products the second thing is is that these companies are just so ambitious so

00:11:11.280 there was kind of a limit to what the railroads could swallow even as they tried to swallow up a

00:11:16.340 bunch of stuff these companies are everything companies google started off wanting to organize

00:11:22.140 knowledge now it's building self-driving cars it's got a life sciences company that's trying to defeat

00:11:27.940 death amazon started off as the everything store and now it's a movie studio it owns the washington post

00:11:33.820 it owns whole foods it powers the cloud etc etc and there's really no end to the etc's yeah i mean

00:11:40.580 what's crazy though you know back in the 19th century going back to the railroads and the

00:11:44.400 telephone companies even in the middle of the 20th centuries that people the government and the public

00:11:49.520 were like leery of monopolies and like they made took actions to you know break those up what's changed

00:11:57.120 in the 21st century where people and even the government like well okay that's if whole who

00:12:02.820 wants to buy or if amazon wants to buy whole foods okay that's great so let's go ahead and do that

00:12:07.040 what changed was in the 1960s there was a famous article written by a law professor uh called robert

00:12:15.440 bork and robert bork would later become famous because ronald reagan nominated him to the supreme court

00:12:21.660 and his nomination was derailed by democrats you got borked you got borked he got borked he got borked he

00:12:27.000 got borked yeah all right so borking uh and you know what else got borked was our antitrust laws

00:12:32.640 because once upon a time there was our antitrust laws existed in order to preserve democracy that

00:12:39.300 there was this fear that once you had private power start to amass into massive content to amass into

00:12:46.260 large concentrations that they would just be able to become way too influential in washington

00:12:51.700 and in elections etc but with bork the concern shifted to to a concept that he called consumer

00:12:59.440 welfare and so in his view everything was about price so so long as a big company kept prices low

00:13:10.920 and so long as it didn't use outrageously bullying behavior on customers or on competitors then there was

00:13:17.860 no problem with it and so everything in our antitrust laws became about price and efficiency

00:13:23.720 and that was a big there's a big turnaround in the concept of antitrust and what you've seen is every

00:13:30.940 year since robert bork wrote his famous article in the 60s our interpretation of the antitrust laws has

00:13:37.080 narrowed further and further until you know in the obama administration i don't think they i don't think

00:13:44.380 they broke up a company you know they did a lot to limit mergers but this idea that a company has

00:13:50.220 become too big and powerful in its sector and deserves to be broken up is just completely fallen by the

00:13:56.820 wayside even though that was once something that the government would routinely do right so bork did

00:14:03.100 have i mean in these the monopolists do have a point like it does allow does create lower prices

00:14:07.980 right that that yeah absolutely and and just can i be clear about one thing which is that

00:14:14.380 i like i think google is an incredible invention i think iphones are are gorgeous pieces of engineering

00:14:22.700 and design and i don't think we want to throw them all into the ocean and go back to some sort of

00:14:30.160 world before the internet i mean not at all i think we want to try to capture the good parts of it but

00:14:36.920 when it comes to antitrust what you're saying is totally true which is that google and facebook are free

00:14:43.140 like you can't argue that they're bad for consumers on those grounds right and amazon keeps prices

00:14:50.560 incredibly low and so if if antitrust is going to have an issue with these if we're going to care

00:14:56.960 about these monopolies we need to shift back to a pre-bork sort of paradigm for considering companies

00:15:03.360 so as as a threat to democracy or the government or something like that yeah totally i mean which is i mean

00:15:09.920 which is really i mean that that is that's the core threat here and so not just to democracy and

00:15:16.500 the government but i also think there are the these questions about privacy that loom extremely large

00:15:23.560 and i do think that there are there are questions about the ways they treat competitors for instance

00:15:29.760 i mean a classic example is the way that google treated yelp so once upon a time when you wanted to go

00:15:35.620 to dinner you typed in you typed in the restaurant's name into google and a yelp review came out and then

00:15:43.100 google saw that and so ah yelp is a pretty good business we should be owning that space and so

00:15:48.260 google started to aggregate reviews and what do you know when you type the restaurant's name into google

00:15:54.780 suddenly yelp got pushed down by the algorithm and so google was creating a marketplace that

00:16:00.760 advantaged itself and so i don't want to completely surrender the our causes for economic concern right

00:16:09.120 i guess amazon does this too like they're they're tracking data on which products sell well and

00:16:15.240 they'll end up just creating that company for themselves to sell that product i think there's

00:16:19.340 like a report that came out that like there's a lot of brands that amazon owns that people don't know

00:16:24.660 that amazon owns yeah and i was just reading an article this morning in the new york times

00:16:28.720 that was describing the way in which amazon so amazon doesn't really like the book publishers

00:16:35.160 and it's kind of allowed for a shadowy gray market to exist where you can buy books used that have been

00:16:44.960 that are basically review copies that have been purchased or other copies that have been bought on

00:16:50.460 that have been bought on on a secondary market and they use that to undercut

00:16:54.800 the the the list price that that has been set by the publishers and that amazon seemingly has accepted

00:17:02.420 and so the point is that amazon is not operating on the basis of fair market rules they're not abiding

00:17:09.680 by contracts uh they're kind of allowing the system to exist in order to sneakily stick it 0.93

00:17:16.140 to these publishers who've been a pain in their ass well i mean besides this threat to you know privacy 0.85

00:17:22.440 um to democracy etc i mean i think one of the underlying threats you made this pretty explicit 0.98

00:17:28.820 was just these companies are a threat to like just the idea of the individual or individuality or

00:17:35.360 individualism can you explain what you mean by that a little bit more right well i mean at the biggest

00:17:41.760 level if you think about it this way these machines are they're just different than other machines right so

00:17:49.840 uh we've had tools ever since we emerged as a species we've had hammers we've had plows we've had

00:17:57.020 factories that have automated upper body strength but these machines are intellectual machines and that

00:18:03.760 they they're designed to amplify and replace intellectual activities and a lot of that is great so i don't need

00:18:12.800 to worry about sense of direction anymore because i've got google maps and ways but it also means that

00:18:18.320 when i'm merging with my machine i'm merging with i'm merging with the companies that operate those

00:18:23.980 machines and these companies have an agenda for influencing us they have a view of human nature

00:18:30.640 where they're trying to to steer us and it's towards a vision where we're integrated into their

00:18:36.880 systems in the way that they want that make them the most money and to me the biggest issue one of the

00:18:43.240 biggest issues has to do with the ways in which they commandeer our attention so this is the one that

00:18:51.900 will be most an example that'll be i think familiar to every single one of your listeners which is the

00:18:57.580 iphone is it's like constantly beckoning us if it's in another room we feel like a limb has been cut off our

00:19:05.040 body and in this kind of almost pavlovian sort of way these phones have been reversed engineered

00:19:13.940 to to to mean that they're always they're always screaming for our attention they buzz constantly

00:19:20.820 with notifications we sleep with our phones and it's in a way they're trying to they're trying to

00:19:29.700 they're trying to own our attention they want us they want everything to be on their platforms and

00:19:35.720 it's incredibly destructive to our ability to to be to have a sense of self to be to be individuals

00:19:45.120 when you're when we're just kind of all guinea pigs in this experiment that they're running on us

00:19:52.020 right speaking of experiments like facebook has admitted to running giant social experiments where

00:19:56.920 they've been able to sway people to do certain things just based on the information they you know

00:20:04.160 present to the user totally and i'm glad that you mentioned that because when i talk about this a lot

00:20:10.880 of times i think people look at me like i'm a crank and that i'm concocting some sort of conspiracy but

00:20:16.120 really a lot of this is just so explicit that facebook has submitted to social scientists using its

00:20:23.440 platforms in a way to run experiments on us as individuals where they try to manipulate our

00:20:30.480 emotional mood or they try to sway us to go to the voting booth they they're just incredibly

00:20:37.980 explicit about how you know if you work for these companies you know that everything is being tested

00:20:44.460 all the time to maximize engagement to maximize the amount of time that you spend on a site and so

00:20:54.500 headlines are being manipulated the use of photos is being manipulated the way in which information on

00:21:00.720 facebook is ordered is being manipulated all to increase your levels of engagement right i mean one of

00:21:09.740 the other arguments you make sort of the hypocrisy of these companies is that they they say that

00:21:14.100 they've taken they've eliminated the gatekeepers right right no more publishers no more editors no

00:21:20.080 more you know people saying what can and cannot or what is worth you know putting out there but you

00:21:26.000 argue like no they've just they're the gatekeepers now they are the gatekeepers are the biggest most

00:21:30.900 powerful gatekeepers in a way in human history and there is this hypocrisy about it um where they

00:21:38.620 they've amassed all this power um everything flows through their gates journalism is hugely dependent

00:21:46.020 on facebook and google for traffic and therefore for revenue publishing is totally dependent on amazon

00:21:54.260 and they're just a massive chunks of the economy that are dependent on these companies and these

00:21:59.880 companies have the ability to pick winners and losers what facebook decides comes up highest in

00:22:05.960 these algorithms are going to be the things that are going to be most popular the things that they decide

00:22:10.080 to suppress in their algorithms are going to be the things that that don't get attention and it's an

00:22:16.020 incredible amount of power yet they they claim to have that they refuse to admit that they hold that

00:22:24.300 sort of power which is part of the reason why they've come under such heated attack right now after the

00:22:31.680 election that we can see that they created a system in which fake news propaganda have flourished the ways

00:22:39.040 in which it was so easy for bad actors to come into their system and to use it in order to manipulate

00:22:46.620 people yet facebook was incredibly reluctant to admit that it had any responsibility over any of that

00:22:54.340 and going back to the consumer how these monopolies hurt consumers okay we get free information low prices

00:23:01.540 and amazon but you know you argue that like the quality of that information we get for free

00:23:06.120 has gotten crappier yes right because like your you know your example of the new republic is a great

00:23:11.740 example first you know was it took pride in writing this very long form in-depth thorough articles and

00:23:16.520 then you were left having to write clickbaity you know you don't won't believe what happened next type

00:23:21.660 stuff in order to drive traffic because that's what does well on these social platforms right exactly and that

00:23:28.180 it's created this is another way in which it's it's kind of destroying individuality which is that

00:23:34.100 everybody who depends on facebook is constantly trying to latch onto the thing that's trending that

00:23:40.340 is most popular there because what facebook wants are the things that are going to be popular those are

00:23:45.840 going to be the things that will keep people most engaged and so there's this shift in ethos

00:23:52.040 towards the facebook ethos which facebook looks like it's promoting individual individual expression

00:23:59.340 and it does to some extent but on balance you'd have to say that it's also created a new herd mentality

00:24:07.540 a new form of conformism and uh homogenization right right yeah and i guess another example you talk

00:24:15.980 about the publishing industry how amazon allows anyone to publish a book but a lot of those books

00:24:22.020 are just garbage unfortunately right i mean you have people just cranking out like especially in

00:24:28.640 the fiction world just cranking out like fiction books like faster than just like the these like 0.94

00:24:33.880 dime store you know uh westerns from the 19th century just just trying to make as much money as

00:24:39.680 possible but amazon allows that well amazon doesn't just allow it encourages it because it's it's the

00:24:46.120 thing that amazon is no different than these other companies they want addictive

00:24:51.900 products it's true in the realm of television and video by the way too where the quality is

00:24:57.220 sometimes higher but this idea of binge watching is is uh you know again they want your attention

00:25:04.080 for as long as possible and we're just in the early days of the ways in which that's going to be

00:25:11.120 monetized i mean as amazon turns turns more and more to advertising your binge watching is going to be

00:25:19.140 a bigger and bigger source revenue for them and so this is this is not a new phenomenon we've always

00:25:26.460 been you know the couch potato is a time-honored american tradition but given the data that they

00:25:34.340 have and the way that they understand you their ability to addict you is going to be much much higher

00:25:41.560 and the paul but just to return to your what you're trying to bring out of me which is this point about

00:25:48.080 quality which i think is hugely important because if you think about it as citizens we have to make

00:25:58.420 really important decisions every couple years about who gets elected to public office and in order to make

00:26:06.120 good decisions we need to have good information and if facebook is just giving us what we what it thinks

00:26:14.760 that we want it means it's confirming our bias uh biases and it's in some ways intellectually incapacitating

00:26:23.920 us and so the implications for democracy are pretty catastrophic yeah no so the existential threat

00:26:30.180 you know the thing like talking about the democratization and like the worsening of

00:26:35.180 quality of content like instagram comedians are the bane of my existence

00:26:40.040 and youtube comedians like they're not funny at all but yeah but they do like they they do well on

00:26:48.560 the platform for some reason i don't know i'm on i'm on this mission to take down instagram comedians

00:26:55.080 all right we'll see if we can make it happen i i you know what i i hadn't really fully appreciated

00:27:00.200 the ways in which my thesis could be spun off and applied to other vectors of human life i think so

00:27:06.080 yeah yeah well i think jerry seinfeld has complained about that before comedians and you know people who

00:27:11.860 write for television they had to like they were put through the ringer right you no longer have to do

00:27:15.880 that and so as a consequence you don't really get the cream anymore rising to the top right right well

00:27:21.940 so i mean what's the solution to this is it just okay you said it's like we don't have to give up on

00:27:26.020 the internet but what do we do to counter that or if you know we're you know yeah what can we do on

00:27:31.600 our on our a personal level and maybe on a societal level right so we've talked a little bit about some

00:27:36.620 of the policy solutions about the return possibility of having taken those anti-monopoly laws that have

00:27:43.320 grown so dusty and hauling them off the shelf and applying them i think we could think about we could

00:27:49.500 even about breaking up some of these companies the europeans are moving to in a way break up google

00:27:55.560 try to sever some of its advertising business from some of the search business could easily imagine

00:28:00.680 doing the same thing to facebook here it's gobsmacking just truly gobsmacking that there's

00:28:06.120 no law protecting your data given how intimate you know we tell we tell our machines things that we

00:28:13.620 would never tell our friends and these companies are sitting there holding that data sometimes selling

00:28:21.280 it on an open market and it needs to be protected on a personal level let me ask you a personal

00:28:27.660 question do you sleep with your phone i don't well god bless you uh yeah when did you decide to give

00:28:34.260 that up or did you never do it i mean i just never really did it i just kind of i don't really

00:28:38.180 wherever my phone ends up that's where that word ends up and that usually is not by me so

00:28:42.580 so there's that i also don't have a personal facebook account wow wow you are the resistance i am the

00:28:49.820 reason and it's it's that it's for that reason like because i'm just freaked out by how much

00:28:53.920 facebook can know about you so i gotta i gotta stop that well i mean look it's really hard it's

00:29:00.280 better it's almost better to not start than to engage and try to disengage because

00:29:06.320 the the human reasons for for kind of being drawn to these devices the the way in which we crave

00:29:14.960 attention the way in which we all of our anxieties and insecurities are amplified by these devices is

00:29:21.740 kind of horrifying and once you're once you're once you're stuck in their experiments it's really

00:29:27.300 it's very very hard to get out and so i mean i struggle with this i honestly struggle with this i've

00:29:34.400 taken i don't have facebook on my phone anymore i shot i killed all the notifications on my phone

00:29:40.060 i i try not to sleep with my phone although there are nights where i find myself kind of doing it um

00:29:47.040 because i want to listen to a podcast say uh or um because i you know you decide that you need your

00:29:54.440 alarm and you don't have an old-fashioned alarm clock nearby because you're traveling or what have you

00:29:59.400 and facebook is just damn it's like i don't i don't really do a whole lot of posting on it 0.64

00:30:04.820 but the voyeuristic aspect of it is so real um and i don't know if you use twitter but 0.88

00:30:11.780 it's like when you tweet something you sit around waiting for to see how people respond to it and

00:30:19.580 it's like this craving of affirmation and this desire not to say something that causes people

00:30:28.280 to shame you and there's it's it's really these emotions that they're messing with are really really

00:30:33.280 powerful i would just say that when you know we we've got lots of other powerful forces in our lives

00:30:41.300 when it comes to the foods that we eat and our compulsion to to chow down or uh there's there's

00:30:49.080 alcohol or what have you and we learn to we learn to eat and drink with with relative moderation

00:30:57.120 except for um some outlier cases and i think it's possible even despite all the powerful

00:31:04.780 forces at work to do the same thing with technology just to to use it in a balanced

00:31:11.260 sort of way where you're able to reap its benefits without permitting yourself to

00:31:16.920 to be a lab rat in their experiment yeah yeah i don't have a problem with like the social networks

00:31:22.260 facebook or twitter like amazon's the one that freaks me out because we we do have alexa in our

00:31:27.340 house and i don't know about alexa i'm kind of i'm a little suspicious of her now i don't know if

00:31:32.080 she's like always listening to what i'm saying could be i don't know i mean it's amazing you even

00:31:39.520 have a question about that of course alexa is always listening well yeah that's right if you say

00:31:43.600 alexa she's like what's up yeah but is she also listening to just conversations i mean they could

00:31:50.300 do that right amazon could sneak in something in their terms of service they're like we we do this

00:31:54.540 and then when you go to amazon.com you see an ad or you see like a product recommended product for

00:32:00.080 this thing you were talking about with your wife right that could happen that and that's creepy that

00:32:05.260 is really creepy yeah well i mean it's kind of the design right is that you're supposed to be

00:32:10.320 the idea is that these companies these devices are supposed to know you in a way that better than

00:32:16.820 you know yourself and that way they can anticipate your desires and they can i mean this is this is

00:32:23.160 another aspect in which individualism and individuality are threatened is that these

00:32:29.420 companies want you to offload decision making onto them so here's the creepiest the creepiest thing that

00:32:36.760 i think is bubbling up which is i don't know if you listen to either zuckerberg or elon musk talk

00:32:44.180 about how they want to read your brain waves right yeah i don't like that i don't know how the hell

00:32:50.720 that could happen i mean it seems like it seems so outrageous to me that that could actually be

00:32:56.000 developed just on a scientific level it i don't i don't get it but then again i never really imagined

00:33:02.500 that you'd have a handheld device where you'd be able to watch every television show ever created

00:33:08.500 or every book ever read that was like a fantasy that was kind of beyond my wildest imaginations

00:33:13.260 as a kid so maybe they can pull it off maybe they pull it off yeah they want you to become part of

00:33:18.120 the hive mind the the new was it new in you you or something like that i don't know the idea that

00:33:25.920 that that uh facebook could like i wouldn't even need to type it would just it would just i could

00:33:31.800 just think and it would suddenly post or it would suddenly reveal whatever my my my inner thoughts

00:33:39.760 are i mean it seems to me to basically that kind of exposes the agenda of the company right that that's

00:33:48.720 their that that's their next end goal i mean that is that is the that is the complete disappearance

00:33:54.660 of privacy when somebody's able to read your brain yeah like zuckerberg has made that like he wants

00:33:58.920 that to happen like he says we want like he wants to get rid of privacy yeah he because he says it's

00:34:04.820 good it's good for society right like you put it all out in the air look if um if your girlfriend

00:34:10.480 if your girlfriend knew like if if you if there was a possibility of your girlfriend knowing that you

00:34:16.300 were cheating on her you wouldn't cheat and that's kind of basically what he's saying because of that

00:34:21.420 that that's a bit that's basically what he's saying that if our public selves merged with our

00:34:26.800 private selves we would be we'd be morally better human beings and we would also he also claims we

00:34:35.460 would be more forgiving of other people because everybody else everybody would constantly be making

00:34:40.800 mistakes and those mistakes would be exposed so you're right i mean it's it's i always i find it

00:34:46.180 fascinating to sit there and read through um everything that he said on the subject simply

00:34:52.960 because it's so radical and there's such a there's such a such a loud view of human nature

00:34:59.720 embedded in what he's saying and it creeps the hell out yeah but then also going back to the idea

00:35:05.140 of diminished individual individuality like if you know your thoughts are being read like you are less

00:35:11.140 likely to engage with possibly i don't know what to say just like risky thoughts like risky ideas

00:35:16.620 which that could put a stifle on all sorts of things scientific advancements advancements in

00:35:21.160 psychology etc etc uh were you just reading my brain right now yeah i was because because i eerily that

00:35:27.600 was what i was thinking no but you're already kind of seeing that already people censor themselves

00:35:33.640 self-censor online because you might get first you know it gets picked up on twitter and then the the

00:35:39.240 mob comes out with the pitchforks and well it's not even just on twitter here's here's an example from

00:35:44.480 everyday life which is when i was when i was started working offices were a thing then and so you had

00:35:51.900 doors that you could close while you were working and people would come into your office and you could

00:35:57.400 talk behind closed doors with them and so if you had an idea that you were thinking about for some new

00:36:03.820 thing you could tell somebody that new idea in private without worrying about the embarrassment of 0.98

00:36:10.520 saying something stupid or saying something that was offensive but now everybody works in an open office

00:36:19.020 space and conversations happen on slack or other chat platforms and so every idea is now turned around 0.99

00:36:29.320 in public and so if you have a new idea you're not closing the door you have to think before you

00:36:34.600 post and so you become more cautious in pitching new ideas you become you become more terrified about

00:36:43.140 offending or about about you just become you become as you say less less subversive you become less

00:36:50.880 innovative you become you become flattened as an individual in that type of environment right which goes

00:36:57.000 against the argument that the silicon valley people make that uh you know it's out you know open source

00:37:02.180 stuff leads to better things not necessarily the case no i i i don't i don't know why i mean these

00:37:09.380 things get uh become so ideological in silicon valley where um openness transparency these things become

00:37:17.860 become mantras that they try to force on to everybody else when all right some instances they're great

00:37:24.880 they work really well like wikipedia is an amazing thing and we shouldn't we don't want wikipedia to

00:37:30.840 disappear it's a great example of collaboration working but no i don't think that that's necessarily

00:37:38.820 should become our foundational belief for the future of human civilization which is the way

00:37:44.980 that they tend to carry their ideas so i'm curious have you noticed any weird things with your book

00:37:51.200 on amazon or facebook because of the things you say about them yeah man i'd be i i don't know why

00:37:57.380 i'm not number one on the new york times bestseller list i think it's amazon keeping me down no i i don't

00:38:03.100 i don't i don't i don't i i don't think they're messing with me right now as i was reading this like

00:38:08.840 wonder okay i wonder if amazon's gonna put the kibosh on his book well hey uh franklin this has been a

00:38:14.020 great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book well there's this invention called the

00:38:19.460 internet you know i i i don't love it in its entirety but i like a lot of it and if you were

00:38:25.780 to go to you know fire up duck duck go or bang duck duck yeah that's that's what i that's what i use

00:38:31.940 for search that's my my default search too i'm trying to like do what i can to fight i'm the yeah i'm the

00:38:37.520 resist i'm part of the resistance or you know what here's something i want to let your your listeners

00:38:41.960 in on a secret if you get in your car somewhere within the proximity of your house i think that there

00:38:48.280 might be a store where they sell books oh yeah okay yeah it's not so not not amazon go to a store

00:38:55.160 no i mean look i buy far far be it for me to to dissuade your listeners from buying my book

00:39:02.640 on amazon if they if they bought my book on amazon look i i know your podcast is a judgment-free zone so

00:39:10.260 i don't think that they should feel any sense of social program no they for doing that we're big

00:39:16.200 proponents of being an individual rugged individual and you do what you want yeah all right well hey

00:39:22.160 franklin four thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure okay real fun thank you my

00:39:26.280 guest today was franklin four he's the author of the book world without mind the existential threat

00:39:30.280 of big tech it's available of course on amazon which we talked about today or if you don't want

00:39:35.260 to do that go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy there as well also check out our show notes

00:39:39.480 at aom.is slash world without mind where you find links to resources we can delve deeper into this

00:39:44.140 topic

00:39:44.440 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice

00:39:58.640 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy the podcast i've

00:40:02.860 gotten something out of it i'd appreciate it if you take one minute to do this review on itunes or

00:40:06.220 stitcher helps out a lot and if you've done that already thank you so much please share the show

00:40:09.600 with your friends that's how the show grows is word of mouth as always thank you for your continued

00:40:13.300 support until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - January 18, 2018

#372： World Without Mind — The Existential Threat of Big Tech

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