#372： World Without Mind — The Existential Threat of Big Tech
Episode Stats
Summary
During the past decade, three companies have revolutionized the way we shop, socialize, and find information. While these companies have made our lives easier in many ways, my guest today argues that they're also eroding autonomy and individuality.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast during the past
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decade three companies have revolutionized the way we shop socialize and find information i'm
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talking of course about amazon facebook and google while these companies have made our lives easier
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many ways my guest today argues that they're also eroding autonomy and individuality his name is
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franklin for and he's the author of the book world without mind the existential threat of big tech
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and today on the show franklin talks about how the utopian ideals of silicon valley have led to an
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internet that's becoming more and more homogenized and centralized we then dig into the vast amounts
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of personal information these companies collect about us and how they're using it on us and then
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franklin argues while these companies make us feel more autonomous they're actually diminishing our
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choices and reducing our individuality he then provides suggestions on what you can do to maintain
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your sense of individualism in today's atmosphere after the show's over check out the show notes at
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aom.is slash world without mind where you find links to resources bring delve deeper into this topic
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franklin for welcome to the show pleasure so you just published a book world without mind the
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existential threat of big tech sounds ominous what was what was the impetus behind behind this book
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yeah it's a wee bit apocalyptic minded i wrote this book i had just gotten fired as editor of the new
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republic which was an incredibly uh traumatic experience for me i'd worked at the new republic for
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a really long time and would had just come off this cycle of where the magazine had been bought by
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chris hughes who was 28 years old worth 700 billion dollars he'd been mark zuckerberg's roommate in
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college and one of the first really a co-founder of facebook and he'd arrived at the new republic with
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extremely lofty ambitions he said i share your commitment to serious journalism and the new
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republic had been was a hundred year old magazine devoted to politics policy
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in fairly high culture um he said i share your devotion to to seriousness i've got a lot of money
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and you guys have been struggling to master this digital world well i i co-founded social media so
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it seemed awesome and for a time it was extremely awesome but then there was a moment where he said look
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we really need to generate revenue and the only way for us to do that is to produce
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pieces that will be very successful on facebook and so we live this just super compressed period
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in media history where we made this transition for being a magazine that prided itself on its
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originality and its seriousness to a magazine that was trying to pander to the algorithms of facebook
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trying to produce journalism that would prove to be popular on facebook and so it was it was a it was a
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really really rushed transition and a new ceo came aboard a guy from yahoo and as soon as he came
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aboard i kind of knew that i was doomed because it took him two weeks to meet with me anyway so i ended
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up i ended up realizing that i was about to get fired so i quit and a bunch of other people quit the
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magazine and it became this object lesson in the media about how silicon valley was swallowing
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journalism and why that was going bad and that was i it just got me thinking along the lines of the ways in which
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journalism actually was a case study for the broader world and that everybody in the world is becoming so
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dependent on these platforms on google on facebook on apple on amazon and uh i i wanted to both uh
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productively channel my anger and also explore this problem that was it'd been extremely interesting
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me long before i'd run into trouble at the new republic right and it's kind of uh this idea the sort
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of the the concern about these tech companies is really hit the zeitgeist because we're seeing it
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with amazon with facebook especially uh twitter even uh so yeah i mean i feel like it's it's like in
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the air it's in the social milieu well when i started writing this book actually amazon was the
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was really my initial impetus just because i had been active in the authors guild which is a group
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that organizes on behalf of writers and when amazon had been renegotiating its book contracts with the
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big publishers it was it was applying super brutal tactics and said we dominate this market and basically
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you have to accept our terms or you're toast and they would strip if a publisher was challenging
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amazon they would strip the buy button off of its books or they would point readers in other directions
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and so that was initially the thing that got me interested in these questions but when i did i like
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i said when i started writing this book people looked at me like i was a hippie howling into the wind
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these companies had such cultural prestige and by the time my book came out the zeitgeist had already
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started to shift i think in no small measure thanks to the election and all the questions about facebook
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that arose out of the election but uh one radio interviewer last week asked me it accused me of
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mouthing conventional wisdom by criticizing these tech companies i thought wow the zeitgeist really has turned
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well let's before we get into some of these criticisms i think it's important to understand
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because it's amazing these companies have just risen to power really fast i think sometimes we
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take for granted how fast they've come to dominate life our lives but i think to understand how that
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happened we need to understand the philosophical underpinnings that sure weren't that that exist in
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silicon valley so what are those underpinnings and what how has that helped them or sort of not help
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them you know directed how they've managed their businesses to where they're grown to these giant
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behemoths well one of the totally fascinating uh facts about silicon valley is that it wasn't just
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the birthplace of apple the internet the personal computer it was also the place where the counterculture
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came into being so alongside steve jobs you had the grateful dead you had lsd you had the communes
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and a lot of the spirit of the counterculture rubbed off on technology as technology rubbed off on the
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spirit of the counterculture and you had in the late 60s and early 70s a bunch of people headed off
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to uh to communes which was a doom a bit of a doomed experiment but that real spirit of wanting
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to tie everybody together in a communal sort of way of using technology to try to gin up a different
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sort of consciousness in the same sort of way that lsd had produced a different sort of consciousness
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those ideas came to infuse our ideas about technology and one of the most powerful ideas
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about technology that we have is this idea of stitching the world together into one and creating
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these massive new mechanisms these these communes really that we can exist in and that in silicon
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valley that became the basis for the idea of the network which is so ubiquitous or all these ideas
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about we think of silicon valley as being kind of libertarian which it is to a certain extent but
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it's also fundamentally collectivist and you see it in the concepts of crowdsourcing social media
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collaboration and networking and these ideas these networks these these kind of giant communes that
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they build are beautiful dreams but when they get captured by big firms they become the basis for
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monopoly yeah i mean i think that that weird tension between libertarian individualism and this utopian
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collectivism is really weird because you do see it and it's like i feel like the libertarianism and
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like there's like a few guys it's like well i'm the guy who can create this utopian collective
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network and so like that they encourage like you know as little regulations as possible so they can
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achieve that yeah no that's right i mean it's it's there's a way in which they're just asking for
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libertarianism for themselves and collectivism for everybody else and you see what you're getting at
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i think is one of the big themes of my book which is that there's there's hypocrisy that runs through
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a lot of these companies that they they insist on transparency and sharing and everybody else's lives
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but when it comes to revealing how their algorithms work they're completely opaque or you know facebook is
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all about sharing but they were so reluctant to share basic information about what russian ads were built
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were bought during the campaign yeah and i mean so one of the arguments so this collectivist idea of
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creating a monop like this is their idea of a lot of you hear a lot in silicon valley is monopolies are
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good yeah so why do they okay you know you grew up in high school learning about how monopolies are
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terrible you had teddy roosevelt busting the trust what why do they think monopolies are a good thing
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well i think there's a business principle behind it which is that they believe that the world operates
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as a series of networks and so you can see this and this is an old idea i mean railroads were networks
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that tied people together the phone companies operated networks that tied people together facebook is a
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network that ties people together google is a network that ties people into google and the principle
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is that these networks work most efficiently when there's only one it just doesn't make sense for there
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to be since facebook is kind of a global telephone book it doesn't make sense for there to be two global
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telephone books or it's a mechanism for staying in touch with people around the world well what if what if
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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
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of this idea of oneness the business idea is the one of oneness and so in silicon valley you have the sense
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that once a firm captures the network it's not even worth competing with them because being second
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place in the network is just not going to yield a huge financial gain but it is i mean there is a way in
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which all this is very different than the monopolies of old first is that these guys just possess so much
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data which is this intimate window inside your head this history of everything that you've read
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everywhere you've traveled everything that you've bought which is then used to kind of increase your
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dependence on the network to keep you engaged for as long as possible or you could even see it say to
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addict you to their products the second thing is is that these companies are just so ambitious so
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there was kind of a limit to what the railroads could swallow even as they tried to swallow up a
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bunch of stuff these companies are everything companies google started off wanting to organize
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knowledge now it's building self-driving cars it's got a life sciences company that's trying to defeat
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death amazon started off as the everything store and now it's a movie studio it owns the washington post
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it owns whole foods it powers the cloud etc etc and there's really no end to the etc's yeah i mean
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what's crazy though you know back in the 19th century going back to the railroads and the
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telephone companies even in the middle of the 20th centuries that people the government and the public
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were like leery of monopolies and like they made took actions to you know break those up what's changed
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in the 21st century where people and even the government like well okay that's if whole who
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wants to buy or if amazon wants to buy whole foods okay that's great so let's go ahead and do that
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what changed was in the 1960s there was a famous article written by a law professor uh called robert
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bork and robert bork would later become famous because ronald reagan nominated him to the supreme court
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and his nomination was derailed by democrats you got borked you got borked he got borked he got borked he
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got borked yeah all right so borking uh and you know what else got borked was our antitrust laws
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because once upon a time there was our antitrust laws existed in order to preserve democracy that
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there was this fear that once you had private power start to amass into massive content to amass into
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large concentrations that they would just be able to become way too influential in washington
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and in elections etc but with bork the concern shifted to to a concept that he called consumer
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welfare and so in his view everything was about price so so long as a big company kept prices low
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and so long as it didn't use outrageously bullying behavior on customers or on competitors then there was
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no problem with it and so everything in our antitrust laws became about price and efficiency
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and that was a big there's a big turnaround in the concept of antitrust and what you've seen is every
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year since robert bork wrote his famous article in the 60s our interpretation of the antitrust laws has
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narrowed further and further until you know in the obama administration i don't think they i don't think
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they broke up a company you know they did a lot to limit mergers but this idea that a company has
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become too big and powerful in its sector and deserves to be broken up is just completely fallen by the
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wayside even though that was once something that the government would routinely do right so bork did
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have i mean in these the monopolists do have a point like it does allow does create lower prices
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right that that yeah absolutely and and just can i be clear about one thing which is that
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i like i think google is an incredible invention i think iphones are are gorgeous pieces of engineering
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and design and i don't think we want to throw them all into the ocean and go back to some sort of
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world before the internet i mean not at all i think we want to try to capture the good parts of it but
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when it comes to antitrust what you're saying is totally true which is that google and facebook are free
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like you can't argue that they're bad for consumers on those grounds right and amazon keeps prices
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incredibly low and so if if antitrust is going to have an issue with these if we're going to care
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about these monopolies we need to shift back to a pre-bork sort of paradigm for considering companies
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so as as a threat to democracy or the government or something like that yeah totally i mean which is i mean
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which is really i mean that that is that's the core threat here and so not just to democracy and
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the government but i also think there are the these questions about privacy that loom extremely large
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and i do think that there are there are questions about the ways they treat competitors for instance
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i mean a classic example is the way that google treated yelp so once upon a time when you wanted to go
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to dinner you typed in you typed in the restaurant's name into google and a yelp review came out and then
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google saw that and so ah yelp is a pretty good business we should be owning that space and so
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google started to aggregate reviews and what do you know when you type the restaurant's name into google
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suddenly yelp got pushed down by the algorithm and so google was creating a marketplace that
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advantaged itself and so i don't want to completely surrender the our causes for economic concern right
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i guess amazon does this too like they're they're tracking data on which products sell well and
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they'll end up just creating that company for themselves to sell that product i think there's
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like a report that came out that like there's a lot of brands that amazon owns that people don't know
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that amazon owns yeah and i was just reading an article this morning in the new york times
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that was describing the way in which amazon so amazon doesn't really like the book publishers
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and it's kind of allowed for a shadowy gray market to exist where you can buy books used that have been
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that are basically review copies that have been purchased or other copies that have been bought on
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that have been bought on on a secondary market and they use that to undercut
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the the the list price that that has been set by the publishers and that amazon seemingly has accepted
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and so the point is that amazon is not operating on the basis of fair market rules they're not abiding
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by contracts uh they're kind of allowing the system to exist in order to sneakily stick it
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to these publishers who've been a pain in their ass well i mean besides this threat to you know privacy
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um to democracy etc i mean i think one of the underlying threats you made this pretty explicit
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was just these companies are a threat to like just the idea of the individual or individuality or
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individualism can you explain what you mean by that a little bit more right well i mean at the biggest
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level if you think about it this way these machines are they're just different than other machines right so
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uh we've had tools ever since we emerged as a species we've had hammers we've had plows we've had
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factories that have automated upper body strength but these machines are intellectual machines and that
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they they're designed to amplify and replace intellectual activities and a lot of that is great so i don't need
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to worry about sense of direction anymore because i've got google maps and ways but it also means that
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when i'm merging with my machine i'm merging with i'm merging with the companies that operate those
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machines and these companies have an agenda for influencing us they have a view of human nature
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where they're trying to to steer us and it's towards a vision where we're integrated into their
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systems in the way that they want that make them the most money and to me the biggest issue one of the
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biggest issues has to do with the ways in which they commandeer our attention so this is the one that
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will be most an example that'll be i think familiar to every single one of your listeners which is the
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iphone is it's like constantly beckoning us if it's in another room we feel like a limb has been cut off our
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body and in this kind of almost pavlovian sort of way these phones have been reversed engineered
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to to to mean that they're always they're always screaming for our attention they buzz constantly
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with notifications we sleep with our phones and it's in a way they're trying to they're trying to
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they're trying to own our attention they want us they want everything to be on their platforms and
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it's incredibly destructive to our ability to to be to have a sense of self to be to be individuals
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when you're when we're just kind of all guinea pigs in this experiment that they're running on us
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right speaking of experiments like facebook has admitted to running giant social experiments where
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they've been able to sway people to do certain things just based on the information they you know
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present to the user totally and i'm glad that you mentioned that because when i talk about this a lot
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of times i think people look at me like i'm a crank and that i'm concocting some sort of conspiracy but
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really a lot of this is just so explicit that facebook has submitted to social scientists using its
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platforms in a way to run experiments on us as individuals where they try to manipulate our
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emotional mood or they try to sway us to go to the voting booth they they're just incredibly
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explicit about how you know if you work for these companies you know that everything is being tested
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all the time to maximize engagement to maximize the amount of time that you spend on a site and so
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headlines are being manipulated the use of photos is being manipulated the way in which information on
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facebook is ordered is being manipulated all to increase your levels of engagement right i mean one of
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the other arguments you make sort of the hypocrisy of these companies is that they they say that
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they've taken they've eliminated the gatekeepers right right no more publishers no more editors no
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more you know people saying what can and cannot or what is worth you know putting out there but you
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argue like no they've just they're the gatekeepers now they are the gatekeepers are the biggest most
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powerful gatekeepers in a way in human history and there is this hypocrisy about it um where they
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they've amassed all this power um everything flows through their gates journalism is hugely dependent
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on facebook and google for traffic and therefore for revenue publishing is totally dependent on amazon
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and they're just a massive chunks of the economy that are dependent on these companies and these
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companies have the ability to pick winners and losers what facebook decides comes up highest in
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these algorithms are going to be the things that are going to be most popular the things that they decide
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to suppress in their algorithms are going to be the things that that don't get attention and it's an
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incredible amount of power yet they they claim to have that they refuse to admit that they hold that
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sort of power which is part of the reason why they've come under such heated attack right now after the
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election that we can see that they created a system in which fake news propaganda have flourished the ways
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in which it was so easy for bad actors to come into their system and to use it in order to manipulate
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people yet facebook was incredibly reluctant to admit that it had any responsibility over any of that
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and going back to the consumer how these monopolies hurt consumers okay we get free information low prices
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and amazon but you know you argue that like the quality of that information we get for free
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has gotten crappier yes right because like your you know your example of the new republic is a great
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example first you know was it took pride in writing this very long form in-depth thorough articles and
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then you were left having to write clickbaity you know you don't won't believe what happened next type
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stuff in order to drive traffic because that's what does well on these social platforms right exactly and that
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it's created this is another way in which it's it's kind of destroying individuality which is that
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everybody who depends on facebook is constantly trying to latch onto the thing that's trending that
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is most popular there because what facebook wants are the things that are going to be popular those are
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going to be the things that will keep people most engaged and so there's this shift in ethos
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towards the facebook ethos which facebook looks like it's promoting individual individual expression
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and it does to some extent but on balance you'd have to say that it's also created a new herd mentality
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a new form of conformism and uh homogenization right right yeah and i guess another example you talk
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about the publishing industry how amazon allows anyone to publish a book but a lot of those books
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are just garbage unfortunately right i mean you have people just cranking out like especially in
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the fiction world just cranking out like fiction books like faster than just like the these like
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dime store you know uh westerns from the 19th century just just trying to make as much money as
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possible but amazon allows that well amazon doesn't just allow it encourages it because it's it's the
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thing that amazon is no different than these other companies they want addictive
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products it's true in the realm of television and video by the way too where the quality is
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sometimes higher but this idea of binge watching is is uh you know again they want your attention
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for as long as possible and we're just in the early days of the ways in which that's going to be
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monetized i mean as amazon turns turns more and more to advertising your binge watching is going to be
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a bigger and bigger source revenue for them and so this is this is not a new phenomenon we've always
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been you know the couch potato is a time-honored american tradition but given the data that they
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have and the way that they understand you their ability to addict you is going to be much much higher
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and the paul but just to return to your what you're trying to bring out of me which is this point about
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quality which i think is hugely important because if you think about it as citizens we have to make
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really important decisions every couple years about who gets elected to public office and in order to make
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good decisions we need to have good information and if facebook is just giving us what we what it thinks
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that we want it means it's confirming our bias uh biases and it's in some ways intellectually incapacitating
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us and so the implications for democracy are pretty catastrophic yeah no so the existential threat
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you know the thing like talking about the democratization and like the worsening of
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quality of content like instagram comedians are the bane of my existence
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and youtube comedians like they're not funny at all but yeah but they do like they they do well on
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the platform for some reason i don't know i'm on i'm on this mission to take down instagram comedians
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all right we'll see if we can make it happen i i you know what i i hadn't really fully appreciated
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the ways in which my thesis could be spun off and applied to other vectors of human life i think so
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yeah yeah well i think jerry seinfeld has complained about that before comedians and you know people who
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write for television they had to like they were put through the ringer right you no longer have to do
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that and so as a consequence you don't really get the cream anymore rising to the top right right well
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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
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the internet but what do we do to counter that or if you know we're you know yeah what can we do on
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our on our a personal level and maybe on a societal level right so we've talked a little bit about some
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of the policy solutions about the return possibility of having taken those anti-monopoly laws that have
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grown so dusty and hauling them off the shelf and applying them i think we could think about we could
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even about breaking up some of these companies the europeans are moving to in a way break up google
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try to sever some of its advertising business from some of the search business could easily imagine
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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
00:30:04.820
but the voyeuristic aspect of it is so real um and i don't know if you use twitter but
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
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
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
00:39:44.440
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
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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