Tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have revolutionized our lives, connecting us in ways that were once unimaginable—to one another, to information, and to entertainment. Conventional wisdom leads us to believe that the technologies unleashed by these corporations have empowered us as individuals. But is that really the case?

In World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, a powerful critique of the role these companies play in our economy and in our lives, Franklin Foer argues that the success of these tech juggernauts, with their gatekeeping control over our access to the world's information, has created a new form of dangerous monopoly in America life. Does our infatuation with the technological wonders these companies offer distract us from the price we pay as a society in terms of surrendered privacy, intellectual property rights, and diversity of worldviews? Is our sense of individual empowerment merely an algorithm-fed illusion?

Join Future Tense on Wednesday, Oct. 4, in New York for a conversation with Franklin Foer and The Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg to discuss World Without Mind and the role of these new technologies in our lives. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.