The Cognitive Crisis in the US

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Ranaforuha is a global business colonist and an associate editor at the financial times based in new york. She's also a global economic analyst for s and n. The first statistic i found was that 80 % of corporate wealth in America now lives in ten per cent of firms. These companies are controlling more wealth than any other company out there, driving the markets. For forty years we think about anti-trust issues as if they've been solved by Google or Facebook. They haven't. We need to trust them with our money again.

With so much data and power centralised in the hands of a few West Coast companies, the tech giants have become a serious threat to our basic freedoms and must be broken up. That’s the argument that was made at this major Intelligence Squared debate by the FT’s global business columnist Rana Foroohar and by businessman and former chairman of Channel 4 Luke Johnson. But others would argue that it’s all too easy to make the tech giants a scapegoat for the inevitable upheavals caused by the digital revolution. The real winners of this revolution are not the tech companies but us, the users. Who could now imagine living without the services of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft? That’s the case that was made in our debate by former head of Facebook’s European politics and government division Elizabeth Linder and competition law expert Pinar Akman. Who's right and who's wrong?

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