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 American 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 and the New America Fellows Program on Thursday, Oct. 5, for a discussion of World Without Mind and the role these big tech companies play in our lives. The event will be held at the New America office in Washington, D.C, and will begin at 6 p.m. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.

Can’t make it to Washington on Oct. 5? Foer will also be discussing World Without Mind in New York on Wednesday, Oct. 4, with The Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg. RSVP here.

Participants:

Franklin Foer
Correspondent, the Atlantic 
2016 New America fellow
Author, How Soccer Explains the World and World Without Mind

Emily Parker
Author, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground
Future Tense fellow, New America

Adam Thierer
Senior research fellow with the Technology Policy Program, Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Anne-Marie Slaughter
President and CEO, New America

Moderator:
Andrés Martinez
Editorial director, Future Tense