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FRANKLIN FOER 103

In the editorial offices of the New Republic, the older culture of ideas collided with
the new culture of information. If ideas are measured by their quality, iriformation
can be quantified in metrics like "visits," "page views," and "downloads." Deter-
mined to increase the :flow of traffic to the New Republic's online site, Hughes
FRANKLIN FOER eventually fired Foer, whose exit inspired two thitds the staff to resign in protest.
Just prior to Hughes' purchase of the magazine, sales had more than doubled,
but on his watch, newsstand sales declined by 57% in 2013 and by another 20%
in 2014. Today, the magazine limps along, a shadow of its former sel£ Hughes
FRANKLIN FOER (RHYMES WITH "LORE") is a writer long associated with the liberal abandoned it in 20i6, after deciding to devote his energies to venture capital.
magazine the New Republic, which was founded in 1914 by leaders of the Pro- Franklin Foer continues to write for some of the best magazines in the coun-
gressive movement. Impatient with the mainstream media, which these leaders try, most recently the Atlantic. His latest book, World Without Mind: The Existential
saw as controlled by moneyed interests, they were hoping to create an indepen- Threat ef Big Tech (2017) tries to come to terms with dangers presented by the
dent journal of ideas. Since then, the New Republic has seen its ups and downs, cultural clash that all but destroyed his magazine, and, quite possibly, many others
but the near-collapse of the magazine during Foer's second stint as editor exposes in the years to come.
the stubborn persistence of the problem it was founded to address: the survival of
independent media in a highly unequal society like ours. In 1914, the elite owed
their towering wealth to railroads, coal mines and oil wells; today they control REFERENCES
the Internet and the "attention economy."
Foer was a casualty and not the cause of the magazine's decline. After a term Sarah Ellison, "The Complex Power Coupledom of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge."
as editor, he left to pursue other projects when he was lured back to the editor's Vanity Fair July 2014. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/chris-hughes-
post by Chris Hughes, then a boyish 28-year-old lucky enough to have shared a sean-eldridge-new-republic-congress-run
room with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg when the two were students at Katerina Eva Matsa and Michael Barthal, "The New Republic and the State of Niche
News Magazines." Pew Research Center. FACTANK: News in the Numbers.
Harvard. As part of the original Facebook team, Hughes later sold his interest in
10 December 2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank:/2014/12/10/the-new-
the platform for an amount purportedly in excess of700 million dollars. And that
republic-and-the.,.state-of-niche-news-magazines/
enormous wealth encouraged him to think that he could reshape the nation's
cultural life in the ways he thought best. One of his first moves was to buy the
New Republic, a respected but financially strapped print magazine.
At first, the New Republic's journalists welcomed Hughes as a white knight
who had arrived in the nick of time to save them from the problems created by
•••
the shift away from print to the Internet. They interpreted the return of Foer as a Mark Zuckerberg's War
sign of Hughes' commitment to serious, hard-hitting analysis. But gradually the
writers at the magazine realized that their owner had something else in mind, as
on Free Will
Sarah Ellison reports in Vanity Fair, another mass-market periodical:
Silicon valley graduated from the counterculture, but not really. All the values it
Over time, one of the big :flash points that developed between Hughes professes are the values of the sixties. The big tech companies present themselves
and his New Republic writers was their productivity. What that some- as platforms- for personal liberation, just as Stewart Brand preached. Everyone
times meant-despite Hughes's stated contempt for "superficial metrics has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfill their intellectual and
of online virality"-was productivity measured in Web traffic .... The democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been
site's traffic did indeed double, but never got beyond that. "It was not a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and
just about traffic," another former staffer told me. "It was. really about empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for themselves, and form their
[Hughes] kind of feeling, 'These writers are taking my money, and
own opinions.
they're coasting. They're sitting around in their office, intellectually We can't entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are parts of the world, even
masturbating, while I'm paying them."' in the United States, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to
organize themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn't accept Facebook's
"Mark Zuckerberg's War on Free Will" from A WORLD WITHOUT MIND: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down
BIG TECH by Franklin Foer, copyright© 2017 by Franklin Foer. Used by permission of Pengwn Books, Ltd. system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation,

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 104 FRANKLIN FOER MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 105

but that's a surface trail. In reality, Face book is a tangle of rules and procedures to redeem his soiled reputation. In the years since, he's shown that defiance really
for sorting .information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit wasn't his natural inclination. His distrust of authority was such that he sought out
of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, Don Graham, then the venerable chairman of the Washington Post company, as
using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments. Wbile it creates the impres- bis mentor. After he started Facebook, he shadowed various giants of corporate
sion that it offers choice, Facebook patemalistically nudges users in the direction America so that he could study their managerial styles up close. Though he hasn't
it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly fu]ly shed his awkward ways, he has sufficiently overcome his introversion to appear
addicts them. It's a phoniness most obvious in the compressed, historic career of at fancy dinner parties, Charlie Rose interviews, and vanity Fair cover shoots.
Facebook's mastermind. Still, the juvenile fascination with hackers never did die, or rather he carried
it forward into his.new, more mature incarnation. When he finally had a corpo-
Mark Zuckerberg is a good boy, but he wanted to be bad, or maybe just a little bit rate campus of his own, he procured a vanity address for it: One Hacker Way. He
naughty. The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. Let's be precise designed a plaza with h-a-c-k inlaid into the concrete. In the center of his office
about the term. His idols weren't malevolent data thieves or cyber-terrorists. In the park, he created an open meeting space called Hacker Square. This is, of course,
parlance of hacker culture, such ill-willed outlaws are known as crackers. Zuck- the venue where his employees join for all-night Hackathons.As he told a group
erberg never put crackers on a pedestal Still, his hacker heroes were disrespectful of would-be entrepreneurs, "We've got this whole ethos that we want to build a
of authority. They were technically virtuosic, infinitely resourceful nerd cowboys, hacker culture."
unbound by conventional thinking. In MIT's labs, during the sixties and seven- Plenty of companies have similarly appropriated hacker culture--hackers are
ties, they broke any rule that interfered with building the stuff of early computing, the ur-disrupters-but none have gone as far as Facebook. Of course, that's not
such marvels as the .first video games and word processors. With their free time, without risks. "Hacking" is a loaded term, and a potentially alienating one, at
they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further attention to their own least to shareholders who crave sensible rule-abiding leadership. But by the time
cleverness-installing a living, breathing cow on the roof of a Cambridge dorm; Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he'd stripped the name of most
launching a weather balloon, which miraculously emerged from beneath the turf, of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial philosophy that contains
emblazoned with "MIT," in the middle of a Harvard-Yale football game. barely a hint of rebelliousness. It might even be the opposite of rebelliousness.
The hackers' archenemies were the bureaucrats who ran universities, corpo- Hackers, he told one interviewer, were 'Just this group of computer scientists who
rations, and governments. Bureaucrats talked about making the world more effi- were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible. That's what I try to
cient, just like the hackers. But they were really small-minded paper-pushers who encourage our engineers to do here:' To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible
fiercely guarded the .information they held, even when that .information yearned Facebook citizen--a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the
to be shared. When hackers clearly engineered better ways of doing things--a box language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service of conformism.
that enabled free long-distance calls, an instruction that might improve an operat- Zuckerberg claimed to have distilled that hacker spirit into a motivational
ing system-the bureaucrats stood in their way, wagging an unbending finger. The motto: "Move Fast and Break Things." Indeed, Facebook has excelled at that.
hackers took aesthetic and comic pleasure if!- outwitting the men in suits. The truth is, Facebook moved faster than Zuckerberg could ever have imagined.
When Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2002, the heyday of the He hadn't really intended his creation. His company was, as we all know, a dorm
hackers had long passed. They were older guys now, the stuff of good tales, some room lark, a thing he ginned up in a Red Bull-induced fit of sleeplessness.As his
stuck in twilight struggles against The Man. But Zuckerberg wanted to hack, too, creation grew, it needed to justify its new scale to its investors, to its users, to the
and with that old-time indifference to norms. In high school-using the nom world. It needed to grow up fast.According to Dustin Moskovitz, who cofounded
de hack Zuck Fader-he picked the lock that prevented outsiders from fiddling the company with Zuckerberg at Harvard, "It was always very important for our
with AOL's code and added his own improvements to its instant messaging brand to get away from the image of frivolity it had, especially in Silicon Valley!'
program. As a college sophomore he hatched a site called Facemash-with the Over the span of its short life, the company has caromed from self-description
high-minded purpose of determining the hottest kid on campus. Zuckerberg to self-description. It has called itself a tool, a utility, and a platform. It has talked
asked users to compare images of two students and then determine the better about openness and connectedness. And in all these attempts at defining itself, it
looking of the two. The winner of each pairing advanced to the next round of his has managed to clarify its intentions.
hormonal tournament. To cobble this site together, Zuckerberg needed photos. Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of govern-
He purloined those from the servers of the various Harvard houses that stockpiled ments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of
them. "One thing is certain;' he wrote on a blog as he put the finishing touches individuals-or what it has called, at various moments, "radical transparency" or
on his creation, "and it's that I'm a jerk for making this site. Oh well." "ultimate transparency." The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate
His brief experimentation with rebellion ended with his apologizing to a details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. Even if we don't intend for our
Harvard disciplinary panel, as well as campus women's groups, and mulling strategies secrets to become public knowledge, their exposure will improve society.With the
106 FRANKLIN FOER MARK ZUCKERBERG'$ WAR ON FREE WILL 107

looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we'll behave aphorism that holds, "Software is eating the world." There's a bit of obfuscation in
better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revela- that formula-it's really the authors of software who are eating the world.
tions will prod us to become more tolerant of one another's sins. Besides, there's There's another way to describe this historical progression. Automation has
virtue in living our lives truthfully. "The days of you having a different image for 'come in waves. During the Industrial Revolution, machinery replaced manual
your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably workers. At first machines required human operators. Over time, machines came
coming to an end pretty quickly," Zuckerberg has said. "Having two identities for to function with hardly any human intervention. For centuries, engineers auto-
yourself is an example of a lack of integrity." mated physical labor; our new engineering elite has automated thought. They
The point is that Facebook has a strong, paternalistic view on what's best have perfected technologies that take over intellectual processes, that render the
for you, and it's trying to transport you there. "'To get people to this point where brain redundant. O:r; as Marissa Mayer once argued, "You have to make words less
there's more openness-that's a big challenge. But I think we'll do it," Zucker- human and more a piece of the machine." Indeed, we have begun to outsource our
berg has said. He has reason to believe that he will achieve that goal. With its size, intellectual work to companies that suggest what we should learn, the topics we
Facebook has amassed outsized powers.These powers are so great that Zuckerberg should consider, and the items we ought to buy. These companies can justify their
doesn't bother denying that fact. "In~ lot of ways Facebook is more like a govern- incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-Simon and Comte
ment than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and articulated: They are supplying us with efficiency; they are imposing order on
more than other technology companies we're really setting policies!' human life.
Nobody better articulates the modern faith in engineering's power to trans-
Without knowing it, Zuckerberg is the heir to a long political tradition. Over form society than Zuckerberg. He told a group of software developers, "You know,
the last two hundred years, the West has been unable to shake an abiding fantasy; I'm an engineer, and I think a key part of the engineering mindset is this hope and
a dream sequence in which we throw out the bum politicians and replace them this belief that you can take any system that's out there and make it much, much
with engineers-rule by slide rule. The French were the first to entertain this better than it is today. Anything, whether it's hardware, or software, a company, a
notion in the bloody, world-churning aftermath of their revolution. A coterie of developer ecosystem, you can take anything and make it much, much better." The
the country's most influential philosophers (notably, Henri de Saint-Simon and world will improve, if only Zuckerberg's reason can prevail--and it will.
Auguste Comte) were genuinely torn about the course of the country. They hated 1HE PRECISE SOURCE OF FACEBOOK's power is algorithms. That's a concept repeated
all the old ancient bastions of parasitic power-the feudal lords, the priests, and the dutifully in nearly every story about the tech giants, yet it remains fuzzy at best to
warriors-but they also feared the chaos of the mob. To split the difference, they users of those sites. From the moment of the algorithm's invention, it was possible
proposed a form of technocracy-engineers and assorted technicians would rule to see its power, its revolutionary potential. The algorithm was developed in order
with beneficent disinterestedness.Engineers would strip the old order ofits power, to automate thinking, to remove difficult decisions from the hands of humans, to
while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose rationality and order. settle contentious debates. To understand the essence of the algorithm-and its
This dream has captivated intellectuals ever since, especially Americans. The utopian pretension-it's necessary to travel back to its birthplace, the brain of one
great sociologist Thorstein Veblen was obsessed with installing engineers in of history's unimpeachable geniuses, Gottfried Leibniz.
power and, in 1921, wrote a book making his case. His vision briefly became a Fifty years younger than Descartes, Leibniz grew up in the same world of
reality. In the aftermath of World War I, American elites were aghast at all the religious conflict. His native Germany; Martin Luther's homeland, had become
irrational impulses unleashed by that conflict-the xenophobia, the racism, the one of history's most horrific abattoirs, the contested territory at the center of
urge to lynch and riot. What's more, the realities of economic life had grown the Thirty Years War. Although the battlefield made its own contribution to the
so complicated, how could politicians possibly manage them? Americans of all corpse count, the aftermath of war was terrible, too. Dysentery, typhus, and plague
persuasions began yearning for the salvific ascendance of the most famous engineer conquered the German principalities. Famine and demographic collapse followed
of his time: Herbert Hoover. During the war, Hoover had organized a system that battle, some four million deaths in total.The worst-clobbered of the German states
managed to feed starving Europe, despite the seeming impossibility of that assign- lost more than half of their population.
ment. In 1920, Franklin Roosevelt-who would, of course, ultimately vanquish Leibniz was born as Europe negotiated the Peace ofWestphalia ending the
him from politics-organized a movement to draft Hoover for the presidency. slaughter, so it was inevitable that he trained his prodigious intellectual energies
The Hoover experiment, in the end, hardly realized the happy fantasies about on reconciling Protestants and Catholics, crafting schemes to unify humanity.
the Engineer King. A very different version of this dream, however, has come to Prodigious is perhaps an inadequate term to describe Leibniz's mental reserves.
fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies. We're not ruled by He produced schemes at, more or less, the rate he contracted his diaphragm.
engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in American life, His archives, which still haven't been fully published, contain some two hundred
the highest, most influential tier of our elite. Marc Andreessen coined a famous thousand pages of his writing, filled with spectacular creations. Leibniz invented
108 FRANKLIN FOER MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 109

calculus-to be sure,he hadn't realized that Newton discovered the subject earlier, caeca or blind thought. Humans were no longer even needed to conceive new
but it's his notation that we still use. He produced lasting treatises on metaphysics and ideas. A machine could do that, by combining and dividing concepts. In fact,
theology; he drew up designs for watches and ,vindmills, he advocated universal Leibniz· built a prototype of such a machine, a gorgeous, intricate compilation
health care and the development of submarines.As a diplomat in Paris, he pressed of polished brass and steel, gears and dials. He called it the Stepped Reckoner.
Louis XIV to invade Egypt, a bank-shot ploy to divert Germany's mighty neighbor Leibniz spent a personal fortune building it. With a turn of the crank in one
into an overseas adventure that might lessen the prospect of marching its armies direction the Stepped Reckoner could multiply, in the other direction divide.
east. Denis Diderot, no slouch, moaned, "When one compares ... one's own small Leibniz had designed a user interface so meticulous that Steve Jobs would have
talents with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go bowed down before it. Sadly, whenever he tested the machine for an audience, as
die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner." he did before the Royal Society in London in 1673, it failed.The resilient Leibniz
Of all Leibniz's schemes, the dearest was a new lexicon he called the universal forgave himself these humiliating demonstrations. The importance of the universal
characteristic-and it, too, sprang from his desire for peace. Throughout history; characteristic demanded that he press forward. "Once this has been done, if ever
fanciful thinkers have created languages from scratch in the hope that their con- further controversies should arise, there should be no more reason for disputes
coctions would smooth communication between the peoples of the world, fos- between two philosophers than between two calculators:' Intellectual and moral
tering the preconditions for global oneness. Leibniz created his language for that argument could be settled with the disagreeing parties declaring, "Let's calculate!"
reason, too, but he also had higher hopes: He argued that a new set of symbols and There would be no need for wars, let alone theological controversy, because truth
expressions would lead science and philosophy to new truths, to a new age of rea- would be placed on the terra fuma of math.
son, to a deeper appreciation of the universe's elegance and harmony, to the divine. Leibniz was a prophet of the digital age, though his pregnant ideas sat in the
What he imagined was an alphabet of human thought. It was an idea that waiting room for centuries. He proposed a numeric system that used only zeros
he first pondered as a young student, the basis for his doctoral dissertation at and ones, the very system of binary on which computing rests. He explained
Altdorf. Over the years, he fleshed out a detailed plan for realizing his fantasy. how automation or white-collar jobs would enhance productivity. But his critical
A group of scholars would create an encyclopedia containing the fundamental, insight was mechanical thinking, the automation of reason, the very thing that
incontestably true concepts of the world, of physics, philosophy, geometry, ev- makes the Internet so miraculous, and the power of the tech companies so
erything really. He called these core concepts "primitives," and they would in- potentially menacing.
clude things like the earth, the color red, and God. Each of the primitives would
be assigned a numerical value, which allowed them to be combined to create Those procedures that enable mechanical thinking came to have a name. They
new concepts or to express complex extant ones. And those numerical values were dubbed algorithms. The essence of the algorithm is entirely uncomplicated.
would form the basis for a new calculus of thought, what he called the calculus The textbooks compare them to re<:mes--a series of precise steps that can be
ratiocinator. followed mindlessly.This is different from equations, which have one correct result.
Leibniz illustrated his scheme with an example. What is a human? A rational Algorithms merely capture the process for solving a problem and say nothing
animal, of course. That's an insight that we can write like this: about where those steps ultimately lead.
These recipes are the crucial building blocks of software. Programmers can't
rational x animal = man simply order a computer to, say, search the Internet. They must give the computer
a set of specific instructions for accomplishing that task. These instructions must
But Leibniz translated this expression into an even more mathematical sentence. take the messy human activity oflooking for information and transpose that into
"Animal," he suggested, might be represented with the number two; "rational" an orderly process that can be expressed in code. First do this ... then do that....
with the number three. Therefore: The process. of translation, from concept to procedure to code, is inherently reduc-
tive. Complex processes must be subdivided into a series of binary choices. There's
2 x3 6 no equation to suggest a dress to wear, but an algorithm could easily be written
for that-it will work its way through a series of either/ or questions (morning or
Thought had been turned into math-and this allowed for a new, foolproof night, winter or summer, sun or rain), with each choice pushing to the next.-
method for adjudicating questions of truth. Leibniz asked, for instance, are all men Mechanical thinking was exactly what Alan Turing first imagined as he col-
monkeys? Well, he knew the number assigned to monkeys, ten. If ten can't be lapsed on his run through the meadows of Cambridge in 1935 and daydreamed
divided by six, and six can't be divided by ten, then we know:There's no element about a fantastical new calculating machine. For the first decades of computing, the
of monkey in man-and no element of man in monkey. term "algorithm" wasn't much mentioned. But as computer science departments
That was the point of his language: Knowledge, all knowledge, could ulti- began sprouting across campuses in the sixties, the term acquired a new cachet. Its
mately be derived from computation. It would be an effortless process, cogitatio vogue was the product of status anxiety. Programmers, especially in the academy,
110 FRANKLIN FOER
MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 111

were anxious to show that they weren't mere technicians. They began to describe buy strawberry Pop-Tarts as they prepare for massive storms. Still, even as an
their work as algorithmic, in part because it tied them to one of the greatest of all algorithm mindlessly imple:-°ents its proce~ures-a:1-d even as it learns .to see
mathematicians-the Persian polymath MUQ.ammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or
as he was known in Latin, Algoritmi. During the twelfth century, translations of
al-Khwarizmi introduced Arabic numerals to the West; his treatises pioneered
:sew patterns in the data-it reflects the mmds of its creators, the motives of
trainers. Both Amazon and N etflix use algorithms to make recommenda-
tions about books and films. (One-third of purchases on Amazon come from
algebra and trigonometry.By describing the algorithm as the fundamental element these recommendations.) These algorithms seek to understand our tastes, and
of programming, the computer scientists were attaching themselves to a grand the tastes of like-minded consumers of culture.Yet the algorithms make funda-
history. It was a savvy piece of name dropping: See, we're not arriviste, we're mentally different recommendations. Amazon steers you to the sorts of boo~s
working with abstractions and theories,just like the mathematicians! that you've seen before. Netflix directs users to the unfamiliar. There's a busi-
There was sleight of hand in this self-portrayal. The algorithm may be the ness reason for this difference. Blockbuster movies cost Netflix more to stream.
essence of computer science-but it's not precisely a scientific concept. An algo- Greater profit arrives when you decide to watch more obscure fare. Computer
rithm is a system, like plumbing or a military chain of command. It takes know- scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for
how, calculation, and creativity to make a system work properly. But some systems, patterns:They talk about torturing the data until it confesses.Yet this metaphor
like some armies, are much more reliable than others. A system is a human artifact, contains unexamined implications. Data, like victims of torture, tells its inter-
not a mathematical truism. The origins of the algorithm are unmistakably human, rogator what it wants ~o hear.
but human fallibility isn't a quality that we associate with it. When algorithms Sometimes, the algorithm reflects the subconscious of its creators. To take
reject a loan application or set the price for an airline flight, they seem imper- an extreme example: The Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney conducted a study
sonal and unbending. The algorithm is supposed to be devoid of bias, intuition, that found that users with African American names were frequently targeted
emotion, or forgiveness. They call it a search engine, after all-a nod to pistons, with Google ads that bluntly suggested that they had arrest records in need
gears, and twentieth-century industry, with the machinery wiped clean of human of expunging. ("Latisha Smith, Arrested?") Google is not particularly forthright
fingerprints. about why such results appear. Their algorithm is a ferociously guarded secret.Yet,
Silicon Valley's algorithmic enthusiasts were immodest about describing the we know that Google has explicitly built its search engine to reflect values that
revolutionary potential of their objects of affection. Algorithms were always it holds dear. It believes that the popularity of a Web site gives a good sense of its
interesting and valuable, but advances in computing made them infinitely more utility; it chooses to suppress pornography in its search results and not, say, anti-
powerful. The big change was the cost of computing. It collapsed, and just as Semitic conspiracists; it believes that users will benefit from finding recent articles
the machines themselves sped up and were tied into a, global network. Comput- more than golden oldies. These are legitimate choices-and perhaps wise business
ers could stockpile massive piles of unsorted data-and algorithms could attack decisions-but they are choices, not science.
this data to find patterns and connections that would escape human analysts. In Like economics, computer science has its preferred models and implicit
the hands of Google and Facebook, these algorithms grew ever more powerful. assumptions about the world.When programmers are taught algorithmic think-
As they went about their searches, they accumulated more and more data. Their ing, they are told to venerate efficiency as a paramount consideration. This is
machines assimilated all the lessons of past searches, using these learnings to more perfectly understandable. An algorithm with an ungainly number of steps will
precisely deliver the desired results. gum up the machinery, and a molasseslike server is a useless one. But efficiency
For the entirety of human existence, the creation of knowledge was a slog is also a value.When we speed things up, we're necessarily cutting corners, we're
of trial and error. Humans would dream up theories of how the world worked, generalizing.
then would examine the evidence to see whether their hypotheses survived or Algorithms can be gorgeous expressions of logical thinking, not to mention
crashed upon their exposure to reality. Algorithms upend the scientific method- a source of ease and wonder. They can track down copies of obscure nineteenth-
the patterns emerge from the data, from correlations, unguided by hypotheses. century tomes in a few milliseconds; they put us in touch with long-lost elemen-
They remove humans from the whole process of inquiry.Writing in Wired, Chris tary school friends; they enable retailers to deliver packages to our doors in a flash.
Anderson argued: "We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data Very soon, they will guide self-driving cars and pinpoint cancers growing in our
without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into innards. But to do all these things, algorithms are constantly taking our measure.
the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms They make decisions about us and on our behalf. The problem is that when we
find patterns where science cannot:' outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organi-
On one level, this is undeniable. Algorithms can translate languages with- zations that run the machines.
out understanding words, simply by uncovering the patterns that undergird
the construction of sentences. They can find coincidences that humans might Mark Zuckerberg disingenuously poses as a :friendly critic of algorithms. That's
never even think to seek. Walmart's algorithms found that people desperately how he implicitly contrasts Facebook with his rivals across the way at Google.
 112 FRANKLIN FOER MARK ZUCKERBERG'$ WAR ON FREE WILL 113

Over in Larry Page's shop, the algorithm is king, a cold, pulseless ruler. There's algorithm, the engineers turn the knob a click or two. The engineers are con-
not a trace of life force in its recommendations and very little apparent understand- stantly making small adjustments, here and there, so that the machine performs
ing of the person keying a query into its engine. Facebook, in his flattering to their satisfaction. With even the gentlest caress of the metaphorical dial, Face-
self-portrait, is a respite from this increasingly automated, atomistic world. "Every book changes what its users see and read. It can make our friends' photos more
product you use is better off with your friends;' he says. or less ubiquitous; it can punish posts filled with self-congratulatory musings and
What he is referring to is Facebook's News Feed. Here's a brief explanation banish what it deems to be hoaxes; it can promote video rather than text; it can
for the sliver of humanity who have apparently resisted Facebook:The News Feed favor articles from the likes of the New York Times or BuzzFeed, if it so desires.
provides a reverse chronological index of all the status updates, articles, and photos Or ifwe want to be melodramatic about it, we could say Facebook is constantly
that your friends have posted to Facebook. The News Feed is meant to be fun, but tinkering with how. its users view the world-always tinkering with the quality
also geared to solve one of the essential problems of modernity-our inability to of news and opinion that it allows to break through the din, adjusting the qual-
sift through the evergrowing, always-looming mounds of information.Who better, ity of political and cultural discourse in order to hold the attention of users for a
the theory goes, to recommend what we should read and watch than our friends? few more beats.
Zuckerberg has boasted that the News Feed turned Facebook into a "personalized But how do the engineers know which dial to twist and how hard? There's
newspaper." a whole discipline, data science, to guide the writing and revision of algorithms.
Unfortunately, our friends can do only so much to winnow things for us. Facebook has a team, poached from academia, to conduct experiments on users.
Turns out, they like to share a lot. If we just read their musings and followed links It's a statistician's sexiest dream-some of the largest data sets in human history, the
to articles, we might be only a little less overwhelmed than before, or perhaps ability to run trials on mathematically meaningful cohorts. "When Cameron Mar-
even deeper underwater. So Facebook makes its own choices about what should low, the former head ofFacebook's data science team, described the opportunity,
be read. The company's algorithms sort the thousands of things a Facebook user he began twitching with ecstatic joy. "For the fust time:' Marlow said, "we have a
could possibly see down to a smaller batch of choice items.And then within those microscope that not only lets us examine social behavior at a very fine level that
few dozen items, it decides what we might like to read fust. we've never been able to see before but allows us to run experiments that millions
Algorithms are, by definition, invisibilia. But we can usually sense their of users are exposed to." ·
presence-that somewhere in the distance, we're interacting with a machine. Facebook likes to boast of the fact of its experimentation more than the
That's what makes Facebook's algorithm so powerful. Many users-60 percent, details of the actual experiments themselves. But there are examples that have es-
according to the best research-are completely unaware of its existence. But .caped the confines ofits laboratories.We know, for example, that Facebook sought
even if they know of its influence, it wouldn't really matter. Face book's algo- to discover whether emotions are contagious. To conduct this trial, Facebook
rithm couldn't be more opaque. When the company concedes its existence to attempted to manipulate the mental state of its users. For one group, Facebook
reporters, it manages to further cloud the algorithm in impenetrable descrip- excised the positive words from the posts in the News Feed; for another group, it
tions. We know, for instance, that its algorithm was once called EdgeRank. But removed the negative words. Each group, it concluded, wrote posts that echoed
Facebook no longer uses that term. It's appropriate that the algorithm doesn't the mood of the posts it had reworded. This study was roundly condemned as
have a name. It has grown into an almost unknowable tangle of sprawl. The invasive, but it is not so unusual.As one member of Facebook's data science team
algorithm interprets more than one hundred thousand "signals" to make its confessed: "Anyone on that team could run a test. They're .always trying to alter
decisions about what users see. Some of these signals apply to all Facebook people's behavior."
users; some reflect users' particular habits and the habits of their friends. Per- There's no doubting the emotional and psychological power possessed
haps Facebook no longer fully understands its own tangle of algorithms-the by Facebook-at least Facebook doesn't doubt it. It has bragged about how it
code, all sixty million lines of it, is a palimpsest, where engineers add layer increased voter turnout (and organ donation) by subtly amping up the social pres-
upon layer of new commands. (This is hardly a condition unique to Facebook. sures that compel virtuous behavior. Facebook has even touted the results from
The Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg cowrote an essay these experiments in peer-reviewed journals: "It is possible that more of the .60%
that argued, "We have, perhaps for the first time ever, built machines we do growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single
not understand.... At some deep level we don't even really understand how message on Facebook." No other company has so precisely boasted about its ability
they're producing the behavior we observe. This is the essence of their incom- to shape democracy like this-and for good reason. It's too much power to entrust
prehensibility:' What's striking is that the "we" in that sentence refers to the to a corporation.
creators of code.) The many Facebook experiments add up. The company believes that it has
Pondering the abstraction of this algorithm, imagine one of those earliest unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding ofits users than
computers with its nervously blinking lights and long rows of dials. To tweak the they possess of themselves. Facebook can predict users' race, sexual orientation,
 114 FRANKLIN FOER
MARK ZUCKERBERG'S WAR ON FREE WILL 115

relationship status, and drug use on the basis of their "likes" alone. It's Zucker- QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS
berg's fantasy that this data might be analyzed to uncover the mother of all rev-
elations, "a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships WITHIN THE READING
that governs the balance of who and what we all care about." That is of course
a goal in the distance. In the meantime, Facebook will probe--const~tly testi~ 1. At times, Foer's argument seems to take the form of a personal attack on
to see what we crave and what we ignore, a never-ending campaign to improve Mark Zuckerberg. Reread the chapter, noting all the moments where Foer
Facebook's capacity to give us the things that we want and things that we don't turns our attention directly to him. What purpose do these moments serve? Is
even ~ow we want. Whether the information is true or concocted, authoritative this simply an example of what philosophers call an argument ad hominem--an
reportmg or conspiratorial opinion, doesn't really seem to matter much to Face- attack on a person rather than a fair evaluation of his ideas? Or does Foer see
book. The crowd gets what it wants and deserves. Zuckerberg as representative of the Internet in general, especially because
Facebook has had such an outsized impact? To what degree does personality
The Automation of Thinking: We're in the earliest days of this revolution, of play an unusual role in the history of the Internet? Millions of people know
course. But we can see where it's heading. Algorithms have retired many of the Zuckerberg's name, but who knows the name of Wal-Mart's CEO or the
bureaucratic, clerical duties once performed by humans-and they will soon Chairman of General Motors? Is there something about the Internet that
begin to replace more creative tasks. At Netflix, algorithms suggest the genres of makes it feel especially personal? How do algorithms contribute to the
movies to commission. Some news wires use algorithms to write stories about personal feel of the Web?
crime, baseball games, and earthquakes, the most rote journalistic tasks.Algorithms 2. A key word in Foer's title is "free will." What does Foer mean by his phrase
have produced fine art and composed symphonic music, or at least approximations a "war on :free will"? The use of Facebook clearly requires active attention
of them. and choice. Newsfeeds provide information nonstop, much of it eagerly
It's a terrifying trajectory, especially for those of us in these lines of work. If consumed. Indeed, it is possible to spend many hours searching for a few
algorithms can replicate the process of creativity; then there's little reason to nur- absorbing posts. No one tells Facebook users what to read or what they
ture human creativity. Why bother with the tortuous, inefficient process of writ- should ignore. At every step, they seem to exercise control, and their deci-
in~ or painting if a computer can produce something seemingly as good_and in a sions are guided by purpose and reflection. What does Foer mean, then, by
painless flash?Why nurture the overinflated market for high culture, when it could alleging that the lnternet--and Facebook in particular-undemrines free will?
be so abundant and cheap? No human endeavor has resisted automation, so why 3. Why does Foer mention Leibnitz, the inventor of calculus? Is he simply
should creative endeavors he any different?
showing off his historical knowledge? Or he is trying to demonstrate a long-
The engineering mind-set has little patience for the fetishization of words term tendency in the West? What were Leibnitz's motives in his attempt to
and images, for the mystique of art, for moral complexity and emotional create a thinking machine which could process ideas automatically? What does
expression. It views humans as data, components of systems, abstractions. That's Foer's knowledge of history add to our understanding of the Web, which
:-7hy Facebook has so few qualms about performing rampant experiments on clauns to be completely new and unprecedented? Why is Foer so critical of
its ~sers. T~e whol_e effort is to make human beings predictable--to ·anticipate engineers, including Mark Zuckerberg? If the purpose of engineering is to
their behav10r, which makes them easier to manipulate. With this sort of cold- enhance the quality of life, why would anyone object to improvements in the
?:ooded thinking, so divorced ~om the contin~ency and mystery of human life, flow of knowledge--improvements that actually hold back a deluge of
1t s easy to see how long-standmg values begm to seem like an annoyance- unwanted information? Does Facebook's mechanical thinking give Zucker-
why a concept like privacy would carry so little weight in the engineer's cal- berg more power, or has it moved beyond anyone's control?
culus, why the inefficiencies of publishing and journalism seem so imminently
disruptable.
Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free QUESTIONS FOR WRITING
"".'ill, t_o relieve ~umans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right
direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that 1. To what extent does the countercultural history of the Internet-its cele-
our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, bration of sixties-style openness-conflict with what Foer calls the "auto-
~n a superior direction. That's always been a danger of the engineering mind-set, as mation of thinking"? The hacker culture Foer references at the start of his
1t moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and begins to design a more chapter celebrates resistance to established sources of authority. And today,
perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in the grand design. the Internet still seems to offer some of us the greatest freedom we eajoy
anywhere. Yet Foer alleges that the masters of the Internet have created a
system that controls everything-even the way we think-without our
 116 FRANKLIN FOER

n� ticin�. Is F oer, an older journalis

t whose influence has declined along
with pnnt ma zines, m o vated by
� � spite, or d oes he have a point about the
way the Web s freewheeling rheto disgui
ric ses authoritarian t endenc ies?
2. The title of Foer's b� ok is World
Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big
T_ech. One key w ord m that titl e is "existential," which can simply imply
that
�ig _tech �ep1:'es�nts a threat t o_ our "existence." But the word "existential"
ames with 1 t nc�er conno tlons. A majo
_ _ � r school ofmodem philosophy is
known as exis tennalism, which espouses
_ the idea that humans have no rea­
so1: to extSt e cept for the ones th
� ey make for themselves. Existentialis
p�osophe:5 like Jean-Paul Sartre rejected t
the idea that a g od created us
with a particul mission or task. Instead, th
_ � e existentialists believ e that we
are ethically obligated t o take full r esponsibility
for the people we become
and the w o�ld we have made. Pretending that
we aren' t responsible is what
Sartre descnbed as "bad faith"-intellectual
. . . dishonesty• Taking these 1'deas as
your ��g pomt, explain how and why "Big Tech" might be
an e� tennal threat . In what ways d oes it app viewed as
ear to free us fro m the work
c reanng ourselves? Does Big of
Tech encourage "bad faith"?

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CON

NECTIONS
BETWEEN READINGS

1. In "The_End ofLoyalty," Rick Wartzrnan chron

icles the triumph ofa new
e con ormc
�odel, one based on cutting production costs instead ofraising
wages. This strategy has worked so far because 1-·� and other retail
. . W-«=1an ers
can rmport pr�ducts manufa ctured overseas for wages so l ow that no Ame
can could �urviv e on them. And h ere at home, ri­
these rerailers have the ability
to underpnce everybody else. The problem is
that with the l oss of
manufacturing jobs, wages h e e_eroding to
� � o . Walmart, then, has radically
changed the character ofsoaal life m Americ
a, but so too has Facebook.
Have they changed soc ial life in th e same way?
Are they both producing the
same trends, or are the two completely separate?
_ Is Facebook helping to end
the �e:15e ofcommuru that used to bind work
_ � e rs and employers together?
Or 1s it helpmg to reknit the tom social fabric?
2. Connecting present ev ents to the past is a distinctive
. . way ofthinking known
as "hist�nazm . g." Often, by turning to hist ory, w e can see o
. ur current sit-
in "Mark Zuckerberg ,s war
uation m a n ew and revealing way. Both F oer
on F ree_Will" and Ta-Nehisi Coates in "The First
_ . White President" his-
tonc1ze m order to � deeper insight into their
_ � subjects. First, explain how
and why they histonaze. Then respond to this
question: Is there something
a�out our culture t oday that makes the past invisi
'?th :11� ble? Does our obsession
_future blind us to t he pas t? What advantages migh
t be gained fr om
histonc izmg?