This week, I’m podcasting How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse, a new article I wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks blog. It’s the most comprehensive of the articles I’ve written about the problems of surveillance capitalism, a subject I’ve also addressed in a forthcoming, book-length essay. In a nutshell, my dispute with the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis is that I think it overstates how effective Big Tech is at changing our minds with advanced machine learning techniques, while underplaying the role that monopoly plays in allowing Big Tech to poison and distort our public discourse.

I think this is a distinction with a difference, because if Big Tech has figured out how to use data to rob us of our free will, anti-monopoly enforcement won’t solve the problem – it’ll just create lots of smaller companies with their own Big Data mind-control rays. But if the problem rests in monopoly itself, then we can solve the problem with anti-monopoly techniques that have been used to counter every other species of robber-baron, from oil to aluminum to groceries to telephones.

MP3