Published in 2017, World Without Mind was among the first major trade books to argue that the real danger posed by Silicon Valley was not simply privacy or monopoly, but a transformation in how culture, knowledge and thought itself are organised.

Franklin Foer treats Google, Facebook and Amazon as institutions reshaping journalism, publishing, intellectual life and the conditions under which democratic culture survives. Written before today's AI boom, many of its concerns now read less as predictions than as descriptions of the world that followed.

Foer is particularly interested in the ideology of technological inevitability: the belief that frictionless optimisation is inherently good, that algorithms should replace human judgement, and that information wants to be free regardless of the consequences for writers, publishers and public institutions. Although later books have expanded on surveillance capitalism and artificial intelligence, World Without Mind remains one of the clearest introductions to the cultural politics of Big Tech, making it an ideal companion to readers of Shoshana Zuboff, Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier or Jonathan Crary.

First Penguin Press hardcover, 2017, with dust jacket. Very good condition with light shelf wear to the jacket and clean, unmarked pages.