by bnsn | 2026-03-01 16:19:24+00:00
might help create a similar environment that would foster the creation of a digital FDA for the brain, as the current FDA is for the body. It would study the effects of all the new technol-ogy—not just on our own mental health, but the health of the nation—and offer sensible regulations to ensure that the technology that's now so indispensable is in service to us, not betraying us.
Big Tech is, as I said in the first chapter, big. That's one reason why we haven't seen more of these changes, and soon-er. The shifts over the past twenty years are so broad and so deep that they are still being metabolized in the public con-sciousness. Silicon Valley is the richest industry in history, rich enough to buy its way out of quite a lot of trouble. Its products are bright and shiny and life-changing enough that we are all too often willing to settle for the dark trade-offs.
That has been the paradox: The good that it does—the information sharing, the relationship building, the productivity enhancing-has been made possible by the bad: the spying, the selling, and the utter breaches of truth and public trust.
Because the positives have been so divine—the ability to summon a fact or a cab in the twinkling of an eye—the diabolical negatives have been overlooked.
But it's time to stop being willfully blind. With Big Tech's wealth and power has come tremendous arrogance. There is a sense that society should be reshaped in its image-that we should all be prepared to move faster, work harder, and disrupt anything and everything. But the truth is that Big Tech answers to us—the people. The United States is in danger of becoming an oligopoly run by the wealthiest and most con-nected, and all too often we feel powerless to change the rules by which companies operate. We need to shake off that feeling of impotence and understand that we can make the rules of the digital economy and society what we want and need them to be. What's more, the stakes are too high for us not to do that. The history of technology is the history of transfor-mation. And no transformation is ever complete. Industrialization expanded opportunity even as it led to the exploitation of factory workers, which led to government reforms, which gave rise to a backlash in the form of the dominance of Chicago School, neoliberal economic ideas, as well as political libertar-ianism, both of which have led in turn to some of the excesses of Big Tech. And so it goes.
Big Tech's size and scale and speed have made it difficult to track and control. But we are beginning to understand exactly what we've given up to get all the bright and shiny new things that we have. No new technology remains unchanged, or keeps its hold over the public forever. The railroads once appeared to be an unstoppable force, until wise public officials put them in service to the broader economy rather than merely the robber barons who founded them. Humans are the makers of the new machines, and despite the dystopian paranoia about artificial intelligence, they are still the masters of them. With that power comes the ability and, indeed, the responsibility to select and then create the future we want from Big Tech-for ourselves, and our children.
As for me, it's a future that will include less screen time, and—at least in the short term—a bit more downtime. I've