From LRB, you are the product: John Lanchester reviews The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention is Harvested and Sold by Tim Wu; and Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio Garcia Martinez. What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture: Elizabeth Kolbert reviews Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us by Jonathan Taplin; and World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer. Will Amazon take over the world? Frank Pasquale reviews Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek and Ours to Hack and to Own by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider.
Lina Khan: “1. My team at Open Markets and I are leaving New America” (and more). The dumb fact of Google money: Tech has too much money. The key sources of policy ideas are increasingly beholden to big funders, who very often have their own financial interests. Being a generous funder of think tanks can pay big dividends in the policy world in a way that likely has a far, far higher rate of return on investment than what we narrowly call “lobbying”. Google is coming after critics in academia and journalism — it’s time to stop them. Citizens against monopoly: As Google aims to consolidate complete power over discussion and free expression, it is time to heighten public urgency and pushback.
We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon: These monopoly platforms hoovering up our data have no competition — they’re too big to serve the public interest. Should America’s tech giants be broken up? Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook may be contributing to the U.S. economy’s most persistent ailments. Trump damaged democracy, Silicon Valley will finish it off: Donald Trump’s rise is, in a sense, just one symptom of the damage the tech oligarchs are doing to America.
