Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will - Issue 52: The Hive

It's not that James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute's Digital Ethics Lab (motto: "Every Bit as Good"), had a "God, what I have I done?" moment during his time at Google. But it did occur to him that something had gone awry. Williams joined Google's Seattle office when it opened in 2006 and went on to win the company's highest honor, the Founder's Award, for his work developing advertising products and tools. Then, in 2012, he realized that these tools were actually making things harder for him. Modern technology platforms, he explained to me, were "reimposing these pre-Internet notions of advertising, where it's all about getting as much of people's time and attention as you can." By 2011, he had followed his literary and politico-philosophical bent (he is a fan of George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) to Oxford, while still working at Google's London office.