1)Read article below
2) Write a rhetorical analysis essay using the prompts/rubric attached.
This selection comes from Franklin Foer’s 2017 book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Foer, a fellow at the New American Institute and a correspondent for the Atlantic, is former editor of the New Republic and author of How Soccer Explains the World.
An existential threat is, of course, one that threatens our very existence. Foer is convinced that the big technology companies that control much of the Internet represent such a threat to humans and especially to our privacy, among other things Americans cherish. At the same time, Foer has a proposal for how we can meet that threat head on and defeat it. As you read this selection, consider how Foer examines a common metaphor in an especially telling way and uses that critique as the basis for his proposal.
from World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
FRANKLIN FOER
The big tech companies believe we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole. By stitching the world together, they can cure its ills. Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality—to the empowerment of the “user”—but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling, a passive, bureaucratic description of us.
atomistic
here, unconnected or fragmented into many parts.
ubiquitous
found everywhere.
invocation
mentioning or calling upon; the word often has religious connotations (a prayer to the deity asking for help) or connotations of magic (an incantation or spell).
The big tech companies—the Europeans have charmingly, and correctly, lumped them together as GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon)—are shredding the principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their hostility to intellectual property. In the realm of economics, they justify monopoly with their well-articulated belief that competition undermines our pursuit of the common good and ambitious goals. When it comes to the most central tenet of individualism—free will—the tech companies have a different way. They hope to automate the choices, both large and small, that we make as we float through the day. It’s their algorithms that suggest the news we read, the goods we buy, the path we travel, the friends we invite into our circle.
monopoly
a corporation that has exclusive control of providing a good or service; the opposite situation would be a market where there is competition among providers.
algorithms
an unambiguous procedure for solving a problem; used here to refer to the computer programs online companies use to make recommendations to you about information, goods, services, and people that might appeal to you.
It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier. But we’ve spent too long marveling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our own role in determining the human path. Once we cross certain thresholds—once we transform the values of institutions, once we abandon privacy—there’s no turning back, no restoring our lost individuality. . . .
One of the clichés of our time: Data is the new oil. This felt like hyperbole when first articulated, but now feels perfectly apt. “Data” is a bloodless word, but what it represents is hardly bloodless. It’s the record of our actions: what we read, what we watch, where we travel over the course of a day, what we purchase, our correspondence, our search inquiries, the thoughts we begin to type and then delete. With enough data, it is possible to see correlations and find patterns. The computer security guru Bruce Schneier has written, “The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of how you spend your time, because it doesn’t have to rely on human memory.” Data amounts to an understanding of users, a portrait of our psyche. Eric Schmidt once bragged, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
psyche
the human spirit, soul, or mind.
A portrait of a psyche is a powerful thing. It allows companies to predict our behavior and anticipate our wants. With data, it is possible to know where you will be tomorrow within twenty meters and to predict, with reasonable accuracy, whether your romantic relationship will last. Capitalism has always dreamed of activating the desire to consume, the ability to tap the human brain to stimulate its desire for products that it never contemplated needing. Data helps achieve this old dream. It makes us more malleable, easier to addict, prone to nudging. It’s the reason that Amazon recommendations for your next purchase so often result in sales, or why Google ads result in clicks.
The dominant firms are the ones that have amassed the most complete portraits of us. They have tracked us most extensively as we travel across the Internet, and they have the computing power required to interpret our travels. This advantage becomes everything, and it compounds over time. Bottomless pools of data are required to create machines that effectively learn—and only these megacorporations have those pools of data. In all likelihood, no rival to Google will ever be able to match its search results, because no challenger will ever be able to match its historical record of searches or the compilation of patterns it has uncovered.
In this way, data is unlike oil. Oil is a finite resource; data is infinitely renewable. It continuously allows the new monopolists to conduct experiments to master the anticipation of trends, to better understand customers, to build superior algorithms. Before he went to Google, as the company’s chief economist, Hal Varian cowrote an essential handbook called Information Rules. Varian predicted that data would exaggerate the workings of the market. “Positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, leading to extreme outcomes.” One of these extreme outcomes is the proliferation of data-driven monopolies.
proliferation
rapid growth or increase.
It’s a disturbing convergence: These companies have become dominant on the basis of their extensive surveillance of users, the total monitoring of activities, their ever-growing dossiers—what Maurice Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi call “a God-like view of the marketplace.” Put bluntly, they have built their empires by pulverizing privacy; they will further ensconce themselves by continuing to push boundaries, by taking even more invasive steps that build toward an even more complete portrait of us. Indeed, the threats to privacy and the competitive marketplace are now one and the same. The problem of monopoly has changed shape. . . .
convergence
the coming together of distinct or disparate things.
What we need is a Data Protection Authority to protect privacy as the government protects the environment. Both the environment and privacy are goods that the market would destroy if left to its own devices. We let business degrade the environment within limits—and we should tolerate the same with privacy. The point isn’t to prevent the collection or exploitation of data. What are needed, however, are constraints, about what can be collected and what can be exploited. Citizens should have the right to purge data that sits on servers. Rules should require companies to set default options so that citizens have to opt for surveillance, rather than passively accept the loss of privacy, a far more robust option than the incomprehensible take-it-or-leave-it terms of service agreements.
purge
here, remove or have removed.
This is a matter of autonomy; The intimate details embedded in our data can be used to undermine us; data provides the basis for invisible discrimination; it is used to influence our choices, both our habits of consumption and our intellectual habits. Data provides an X-ray of the soul. Companies turn that photograph of the inner self into a commodity to be traded on a market, bought and sold without our knowledge.
autonomy
independence or freedom outside control.
It’s a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data. The law should demand that these companies treat this data with the greatest care, because it doesn’t belong to them. Possessing our data is a heavy responsibility that must come with ethical obligations. The American government has a special category for corporations that profit from goods that they don’t truly own: We call them trustees. This is how the government treats radio and television broadcasters. Those companies make money from their use of the public airwaves, so the government requires that these broadcasters adhere to a raft of standards. At times, they were asked to broadcast civil defense warnings and public service announcements; they were asked to adhere to decency standards and were required to provide equal airtime to candidates of both political parties. The government, in the form of the Federal Communications Commission, supervises the broadcasters to guarantee that they don’t shirk these obligations. . . .
enshrinement
the act of treating something as sacred and, thus, protecting it, in this case, by making laws or government policies about it.
stealthily
in a secret, hidden manner.
A Data Protection Authority would be the heir to this tradition. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission, which evaluates mergers to preserve low prices and economic efficiency, the authority would review them to protect privacy and the free flow of information. It would constrain monopolies as they attempt to carry their power into the next era, creating the opening through which challengers can ultimately emerge. . . . The health of our democracy demands that we consider treating Facebook, Google, and Amazon with the same firm hand that led government to wage war on AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft—even dismembering them into smaller companies if circumstances (and the law) demand a forceful response. While it has been several generations since we wielded antitrust laws with such vigor, we should remember that these cases created the conditions that nurtured the invention of an open, gloriously innovative Internet in the first place. . . .
antitrust
encouraging competition rather than monopolies.
The long history of regulation also shows that the project is not nearly as futile as its critics claim. When government tries to remodel the economy for the sake of efficiency, it has amassed a mixed record. When government uses its power to achieve clear moral ends, it has a strong record. There are notable failures, for sure. But our automobiles are safer, our environment is cleaner, our food doesn’t poison us, our financial system is fairer and less prone to catastrophic collapse, even though those protective provisions have imposed meaningful costs on the private sector. . . . The Internet is amazing, but we shouldn’t treat it as if it exists outside history or is exempt from our moral structures, especially when the stakes are nothing less than the fate of individuality and the fitness of democracy.
