Franklin Foer discovers the existential threat posed by large technology companies, and in this brilliant work, he provides an intellectual guide to confronting their overwhelming and pervasive influence on our lives. Over the past few decades, the world has witnessed an unprecedented revolution in who controls knowledge and information. This rapid shift has changed the way we think and endangered our intellectual independence. Without pausing to consider the cost, we rushed to embrace the products or services of four giant companies: we buy through Amazon, communicate on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information. These companies market themselves as making the world better, but in reality, they have given us a narcotic dose of daily convenience; we succumbed to their power, and as they expanded under the banner of individualism and diversity, their algorithms pushed us toward forced conformity, destroyed our privacy, and created a fragile culture of misinformation. They have set us on the path to a world devoid of individual contemplation, independent thought, and solitary reflection; a world without mind. To reclaim our inner lives, we must avoid falling into the clutches of these giant companies and understand the ideas upon which their power was built. In this book, Foer elegantly maps the intellectual history of computer science, from Descartes and the Enlightenment to Alan Turing and Stewart Brand and the roots of Silicon Valley in hippie culture. He also reveals the dark side lurking behind our idealistic dreams of technology, as giant companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon - as he describes them - trample established liberal values, especially intellectual property rights and privacy. We are living in the first phase of a complete automation and comprehensive homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life, but we can stop this tide before it swallows us by reclaiming our individual authority over the way we think and our intellectual interaction with the world around us. This matter is no less important than the essence of our humanity and what we will become in the future, for monopolies have existed before, but today's giants are more dangerous; they seek to infiltrate every corner of our identity and influence every decision we make. So far, only a few have realized the extent of this danger, and here Franklin Foer explains the looming existential crisis and demonstrates the necessity of resisting it.