Big tech and social media giants are inflicting profound damage on our society.
We do believe in the promise of technology to lead us to a new era of human progress and prosperity. We also believe technology can deliver unimaginable destruction and harm, accelerated by the power of AI.
We believe the internet was created over half a century ago to connect machines to machines and data to data, not people to people. Its outdated design has reduced people to users. It has become a techno-capital engine, incentivized to stalk, manipulate, and prey upon people – and it has dehumanized us.
Frank McCourt is the founder of Project Liberty and author, with Michael J. Casey, of the forthcoming book OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in Our Digital Age to be published by Crown in 2024.
We believe it has become an insatiable machine that harvests our identities to generate enormous wealth for tech and social media Goliaths. We cannot unsee the price the world is now paying for their profits.
The harm is real
We believe the breakdown of civility and democracy, our cultural and political polarization, the radicalization of our neighbors, the censorship of free speech, the increase in mass shootings, our inability to agree on what is good and true, the displacement of parents from their rightful role in protecting their children, and AI’s threat to millions of livelihoods are all in large part consequences of our digital dehumanization.
We believe our children’s mental health is under attack by a system that so powerfully exploits their vulnerabilities and self-doubts that their brains are being altered. Children are harming themselves and committing suicide at record rates.
We believe our society and democracy cannot survive such autocratic, centralized technology.
We are more than big-tech’s data
We believe people have been stripped of their rights on the internet because it doesn’t see us as human beings at all. It sees us only as data, which Big Tech manipulates and monetizes. Until we are recognized as people, not just producers of data, we will not reclaim our voices or our rights.
We believe a small group of techno-capital innovators have been incentivized to rule as kings, exploit us, and rationalize our exploitation as progress.
The Techno-Optimists will say…
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