World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

Author:Franklin Foer [Foer, Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

Eight

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

SILICON VALLEY’S ASSAULT on journalism is a piece of a larger program. The technology companies want to overturn an entrenched idea at the heart of Western civilization. For three hundred years, our culture has venerated genius—it has made a fetish of originality and intellectual novelty. This can be a bit of an overwrought fixation. To state the banal, we know that there’s no such thing as a wholly original idea. The intellectual life is never quite as solitary as it seems. But there were excellent reasons for buying into the cult of genius. We consider humanity capable of moral progress. Forward motion requires a constant infusion of new ideas, whose production we must lavishly credit to incentivize. We consider conformism to be spiritually and morally deadening, so we celebrate its opposite. Genius and originality were two of the most revelatory and lasting ideas to emerge from the intellectual revolutions of the eighteenth century.

Silicon Valley has an entirely different view of human creativity. It believes in the virtues of collaboration, that groups working harmoniously yield better ideas than the isolated individual. It considers originality to be a highly overrated ideal, even a pernicious one. By emphasizing genius, we allow a small cadre of professional writers to act as if they monopolize wisdom or possess some superhuman capabilities. The aura of genius surrounding the accomplished writer creates the impression that the masses have relatively little creative potential, which has justified force-feeding them the creative output of that small priesthood of geniuses.

If Silicon Valley were merely lampooning our old fetish for genius, that would be harmless, maybe even salutary. But its goals are far more revolutionary than that. It has set out to dismantle the structures that have protected our ideas of authorship. Silicon Valley has waged war on professional writers, attempting to weaken the copyright laws that make it possible for authors to make a living from their pen. It has pursued a business plan that radically deflates the value of knowledge, which renders writing a cheap, disposable commodity. To pull off this strategy, it has attempted to puncture the prestige of the professional author. This war is another instance of Silicon Valley’s fake populism. Fittingly, its primary theorist is a Harvard law professor.

• • •

LONG BEFORE TED TALKS, there was Larry Lessig. His lectures and speeches were gripping spectacles of intellect, punctuated by multimedia. They became the stuff of legend. To this day, an official Microsoft tutorial provides lessons in how to give a “Lessig-style” talk. More than any other academic of his generation, Lessig has a feel for the zeitgeist. Before his fellow law professors had ever heard of the Internet, he made it his specialty. That doesn’t quite give him enough credit: Lessig did more than study the Internet, he defended it against existential threats. One magazine profile described him as “a kind of Internet messiah.”

What made this intellectual entrepreneurship so impressive was the seemingly narrow patch of academia from which Lessig launched himself. His nominal subject was the jurisprudence of copyright.

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