--- title: We're Dangerously to Big Tech Controlling Our Thoughts description: Elon Musk's attempt to acquire Twitter is another step in Big Tech's efforts to control our thoughts, writes Susie Alegre canonical: https://time.com/6191973/big-tech-freedom-of-thought/ author: Susie Alegre article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-06-29T16:19:22.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:36:52.148Z article:section: Ideas og:title: We're Dangerously Close to Giving Big Tech Control Of Our Thoughts og:description: Elon Musk's attempt to acquire Twitter is another step in Big Tech's efforts to control our thoughts, writes Susie Alegre og:url: https://time.com/6191973/big-tech-freedom-of-thought/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt441ec72c24a14725/698a3345db2987aae1267f4d/GettyImages-1397785239.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Elon Musk Buys Twitter og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: We're Dangerously Close to Giving Big Tech Control Of Our Thoughts twitter:description: Elon Musk's attempt to acquire Twitter is another step in Big Tech's efforts to control our thoughts, writes Susie Alegre twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt441ec72c24a14725/698a3345db2987aae1267f4d/GettyImages-1397785239.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # We're Dangerously Close to Giving Big Tech Control Of Our Thoughts > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=893f0442-5a7f-4e88-9c56-ce8aaccc3c11&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk [Watch (HLS stream): TIME Person of the Year 2021: Elon Musk](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/mYXITUNy.m3u8) (12:42)  _Published 2021-12-13. Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too. In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society._ by [Susie Alegre](https://time.com/author/susie-alegre/) ## Susie Alegre Jun 29, 2022 4:19 PM UTC Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too. In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society. by [Susie Alegre](https://time.com/author/susie-alegre/) ## Susie Alegre Jun 29, 2022 4:19 PM UTC Elon Musk has proclaimed himself to be a [“free speech absolutist”](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?lang=en) though [reports](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/technology/spacex-employees-fired-musk-letter.html) of the way employees of his companies have been treated when exercising their free speech rights to criticise him might indicate that his commitment to free speech has its limits. But as Musk’s bid to takeover Twitter progresses in fits and starts, the potential for anyone to access and control billions of opinions around the world for the right sum should focus all our minds on the need to protect an almost forgotten right—the right to freedom of thought. In 1942 the U.S. Supreme Court wrote [“Freedom to think is absolute of its own nature, the most tyrannical government is powerless to control the inward workings of the mind.”](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/316/584/) The assumption that getting inside our heads is a practical impossibility may have prevented lawyers and legislators from dwelling too much on putting in place regulation that protects our inner lives. But it has not stopped powerful people trying to access and control our minds for centuries. At his trial for War Crimes in Nuremberg after the Second World War, Albert Speer, Hitler’s former Minister of Armaments, explaining the power of the Nazi’s propaganda machine [said](https://www.tracesofwar.com/articles/4573/Final-statement-Albert-Speer.htm): “Through technical devices such as radio and loudspeaker 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man…. Today the danger of being terrorized by technocracy threatens every country in the world.” When whole communities are deprived of independent thought, it undermines their individual rights to freedom of thought and opinion. But it is not only a threat to the rights of the people who are manipulated. As the world saw with Nazi Germany, it becomes a threat to all our rights. Tragically, Speer’s warning is acutely resonant in the 21st-century as technology has been harnessed as an even more efficient tool for manipulation and control of the minds of populations with devastating consequences. Facebook’s role in facilitating genocide in Myanmar, a country where [the platform turned into a “beast” according to UN factfinders](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook-idUSKCN1GO2PN) was a wake up call to the potential for social media profiling and targeting to twist people’s minds inciting deadly violence. Facebook committed to doing better, but as the events that played out across the world’s screens from the [U.S. Capitol on 6 January last year](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/22/jan-6-capitol-riot-facebook/) and the ongoing [ethnic violence in Ethiopia](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/20/facebook-lets-vigilantes-in-ethiopia-incite-ethnic-killing) today show, their approach is hopelessly inadequate. It is not just because of the enormous challenge of content moderation on a global platform, the business model of social media based on surveillance advertising facilitates the hijacking of user engagement to deadly effect. An investigation by the campaign group [Global Witness last year showed](https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/big-tech-business-model-poses-threat-democracy/) that they were able to get inflammatory adverts approved on Facebook to target individuals in Northern Ireland across the sectarian divide at a time of heightened tensions. When propaganda can be automated, curated and targeted to reach billions worldwide for profit, it is an existential threat to humanity and one that none of us can afford to ignore. It may have been Facebook in the frame for these incidences of violence, but a global platform like Twitter could be an equally powerful tool for manipulation on a massive scale as Donald Trump well knew. Twitter is valuable, not because of what you can say on the platform, but because of the billions of opinions you can control through the curation of individual news feeds. Increasingly the purpose of technological innovations, whether in the online environment or using big data, artificial intelligence or neuroscience is, precisely, to access and control the inner workings of our minds. That is where the money is. Inferences drawn from huge pools of data about us are used to decide if we are [susceptible to gambling](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/technology/gambling-apps-tracking-sky-bet.html) or [prone to conspiracy theories](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/25/qanon-facebook-conspiracy-theories-algorithm), if we are anxious or over-confident so that our vulnerabilities can be managed, sold and exploited. Our minds are a valuable commodity in both the commercial and the political spheres. Technology is being developed not only [to predict our political leanings from our faces](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1), but also to [identify our individual psychological buttons and to press them](https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/3735/why-were-concerned-about-profiling-and-micro-targeting-elections) in ways that might make it more or less likely that you’ll get off the couch and go out and vote. The [rise of “neuropolitics](https://www.jstor.org/stable/26372808)” and the use of political behavioural psychography in electoral processes around the world is problematic because it undermines the foundations of democracy, no matter who is paying for it or which way you vote. The use of these tactics spans ideological divides but we when we are talking about mass mind control, the implications are so profound and devastating that the ends can never justify the means. Politics is always about influence and persuasion, but democracy relies on the votes of individuals who have formed their opinions free from manipulation. At a time when many of us get most, or all of our information online, we need to make sure that our minds cannot be easily hijacked and sold to the highest bidder. The [Washington DC Attorney General’s recent move to sue Mark Zuckerberg personally for Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal](https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/23/tech/dc-zuckerberg-suit-cambridge-analytica/index.html) may mark a shift in the right direction. Free flows of information allow us to form our opinions freely, we cannot afford to make one person the global gatekeeper to our minds, no matter how keen they may seem to be on freedom. It’s not just about social media. Technologists have ambitions beyond the screens we stare at and the enthralling devices we have glued to our palms. Elon Musk’s Neuralink has its sights set on nothing less than direct access to our brains. It claims to be [“designing the first neural implant that will let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go.”](https://neuralink.com/approach/) Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI’s) won’t just control the way we receive information, they will control how our minds meet the world. When Facebook announced its own project to develop non-invasive BCI in 2017, [it promised that it would only read the thoughts you wanted it to](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/facebook-brain-interface/?guccounter=1&guce%5Freferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce%5Freferrer%5Fsig=AQAAACoj5LO-rWNl-1Ex1zc0JV2Z6wOEpA%5FDKvZnL4BoEWXjAQ3lVQ8TeFzw%5FN6yu3rxq2iYjP7s3Vsewm0DlfoszMTMiQI8ssjyP23t%5FXsxHJYTL8fo8HU8Mc2WdijJbBfpe8cetSaTtC%5FINURekKjFXiwvniGk7OqHc8vIi0Z%5F1O0P). In [2021, it shelved the project](https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028447/facebook-brain-reading-interface-stops-funding/). Perhaps it realised direct access to the human mind was just a bridge to far. Reading our minds in real time is only a part of it, in 2019[, neuroscientists published an experiment](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6747687/) where, by implanting electrodes into the brains of mice they could make the animals see things that were simply not there. If you worry about deepfakes, imagine how much more dangerous they could be if they were not on your screen but actually in your head. While brain implants for manipulative marketing or mind-reading may not sound too appealing, when dressed up as health tech, these tools suddenly become saleable. Musk has reportedly claimed that Neuralink [could help control hormone levels and mood to our advantage.](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/251574/20200804/elon-musk-neuralink-update-mood-control.htm) But if your hormone levels can be changed to alter your brain to your advantage, they may also be altered to the advantage of someone else if that was more profitable or politically expedient. And imagine if you had to upgrade your brain as often as your phone to deal with those tricky built-in downgrades depleting your battery and clogging up your memory just that bit faster with every new model…. Whether we are looking at the global management of information flows or the tiny threads of Neuralink’s brain-computer-interface pushing through our skulls, we need to wake up to the fundamental threat of systems that allow direct access to our minds en masse. While [freedom of speech can be limited in certain circumstances](https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/docs/gc34.pdf), the [right to freedom of thought is absolute in international human rights law](https://www.refworld.org/docid/453883fb22.html). It means that we have the right to keep our thoughts private, not to be penalized for our thoughts alone, and to keep our inner lives free from manipulation. We can no longer rely on the Supreme Court’s outdated assumption that no one can control the inward workings of our mind. Whether or not the claims are overblown, technology is already trading on its potential to do just that. We need freedom of thought to combat climate change, racism and global poverty, and to fall in love, laugh and dream. It is crucial to the cultural, scientific, political and emotional life in our societies. Once we lose it we may never get it back. Musk’s takeover of Twitter combined with his ambitions for Neuralink make the threat of big tech to our freedom of thought impossible to ignore. We need serious regulation to check the systems that want get inside our heads and we need it now. Tackling the business models underpinning social media and banning the use of BCI’s as consumer products before they become a mass-market reality would be first, but urgent steps. We must learn from history the dangers of letting one man control the minds of millions or billions of people and we must be prepared to say no before it is too late. It’s not about Elon Musk, it’s about anyone having that kind of access to your mind. Our future should not be built on the best way to monetise the global population and obtain world domination for the few. It must be grounded in what it means to be human, and for that, we must have the freedom to think. _Adapted from Alegre’s new book Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate our Minds” by Susie Alegre, published by Atlantic Books_ ## Transcript Okay, all right, all good. So, which living person do you most admire? I admire anyone who is making a positive contribution to humanity. Whether that is an entertainment or technology or, you know, I think anyone who's sort of doing things that are really useful to the rest of humanity is, I admire them greatly. You know, it's really hard to escape Elon Musk's dominance over so many things in American life, right now. He's got this rocket company that is completely dominating the space launch business. He's got a car company that is completely dominating the electric vehicle market. He's got 65 million Twitter followers, and he likes to make weird jokes and set people off. And sometimes with a single tweet, he can control the stock market or the value of various different cryptocurrencies. So this is a man who's just sort of become ever present across a lot of different sectors. And this was really the year that he came into his own. His goal is to make humanity a multi-planet species. And in a time in which NASA has abdicated its operations to put people in low Earth orbit. And for the time being, at least, put people on the other worlds, SpaceX has stepped in like no other private company before it around the world. So Elon Musk's wealth is largely tied up in Tesla stock. He is the not only the CEO, he is its largest shareholder. And Tesla is one of the most valuable companies in the country, its market value is more than $1 trillion dollars. And his wealth is sort of tied up in that company. Tesla has dragged the legacy automators into the electric vehicle market. Yeah. Do companies like Ford, GM, Rivian, Lucid, pose a threat to Tesla's dominance? Or do you think you guys have so grasp the market at this point that you are going to own it? Well, if somebody makes better cars than we do, then, and they then sell more cars than we do, I think that's totally fine. Our intent with Tesla was always that we would serve as an example, to the car industry and that, and hope that they also make electric cars so that we can accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. I'm confident in the future in Tesla that will do well. And I hope some of these other companies do well, too. Earlier this year, this Tesla crashed into a highway divider in California killing the driver, another slammed into a parked fire truck in Utah, both had the autopilot feature on. There is a federal investigation underway into the autopilot software that Tesla has, which despite the name is not autopilot software, it does not drive the car for you. And people inside Tesla have expressed a lot of skepticism about whether the company's technology is eventually going to be able to get there. Are the cars safe? I mean, should I feel comfortable getting behind the wheel of a Tesla and saying, drive me where I need to go? Well, the statistics that I think are at this point unequivocal, that you know far more accidents off autopilot than on autopilot. So this is not to say that autopilot is perfect. Now to get to full self driving where you don't need to pay attention, we still obviously have a lot of work to do. So as we get to the point where interventions are extremely rare even in complex traffic situations, and get to the point where the probability of injury with full self driving is much lower than whether human driving. Right. Then obviously at that point, it would make sense to allow the car to drive itself and not have to pay attention. So this year, Elon Musk became the world's richest man ever. So we asked him about another pressing global problem, and that is income and wealth inequality. When it's time to pay taxes, new reporting from ProPublica says the nation's top 25 richest people pay little to nothing at all, including Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. One of the main criticisms of him is just that he's so rich, should any human being be worth $300 billion dollars? Yeah, a lot of the push for higher government involvements, and expropriation of assets by the government is really pushed by a bunch of politicians who are actually saying that resources shouldn't be in control of people—of private individuals, they should be in control of the government. They're basically saying they want control of the assets. I mean, I think in terms of things that people should perhaps get upset about is like, I think getting upset about excess consumption is a thing to get upset about. But, you know, somebody is just wasting money on personal luxuries in a crazy way. You know, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not Warren Buffett's biggest fan, frankly. But, you know, he sits there. And he reads all these annual reports, which are super boring. Does anybody want that job? I think most people do. No, I don't want that job. But like, he's not, he's not like, engaged in like, insane, conspicuous consumption. So you have say, like, okay, sure he's got a high net worth, but doesn't— he's doing a useful job for the economy, you know, and he's very skilled at it, and should probably keep doing it. Elon Musk definitely uses Twitter in a way that no other business leader does. And it's gotten him into a lot of trouble in recent years. His twitter feed is juvenile, to say the least he has insulted some important people in really immature ways. But when a person with 65 million followers and $300 billion dollars, is just having fun, that tends to create ripples in the larger pond. You are not to put too fine a point on it, the richest man in the history of the world, and arguably the most influential. And yet you tweet freely and playfully and mischievously. I guess that's—that's accurate. So are feuds with policymakers? Or poking Jeff Bezos? Is that good for the overall brand? Yeah, I don't really think about brand optimization to be frank, as lobbyists for my tweets, which are often self inflicted wounds, or humor that I find funny, but not necessarily that other many other people find funny, right? You know, when you say take the red pill, do you worry about sending none to— I say take both pills. But do you worry at all about activating motivating the, you know, political fringe? Yeah, actually, when I said take the red pill, I didn't realize that was some like, politically charged phrase— Right. I'm just referring to "The Matrix". Yeah. You know, yeah. Like, you know, make sure you accept reality for what it is right? And it turns out, it's like, also like some, like, accept right wing dogma thing, or something? I don't, I didn't realize that at the time. You do have the ability to move markets with a tweet, should any one man have that power? Well, um, you know, the markets move themselves all the time. And so, you know, especially Tesla stock has seen some very big changes in value from one day to the next based on nothing, as far as I can tell. So just statements that I make_ are they materially different from random movements of the stock that might happen anyway? I don't think so. It's not like, you know, stock drops in half or something like that, you know, Elon Musk is someone who pursues his goals relentlessly. And I think that does sometimes make him blind to the potential human toll, the potential human cost that, that can create for some of the people who gets sort of ground up in the gears of the things he's trying to do. You've made statements, downplaying COVID-19, you kept your factories open, running at the height of the pandemic. Well, actually, technically, I think there's a misunderstanding there on the on the factories front, Tell me about that. So other car factories in the United States had started—had restarted. Right. And we were blocked, only because our car factories in the Bay Area in California. So California had actually said, manufacturing can restart. And then Alameda County sided off their own accord that the Tesla could not restart. Reopening the factory in Alameda was arguably a poor management choice. I think he was aware of the risks that his employees were taking. I don't think it was necessarily a fair choice to pressure or invite or ask or instruct employees to come back to work. Are you vaccinated? If I may ask. Yeah. I'm very pro-vaccination. We've it's the science is unequivocal. I treat it to that effect. But by the same token, I am against forcing people to be vaccinated. You know, I think this is just not something we should do in America. I think we should encourage people to be vaccinated, strongly try to convince them to be vaccinated, but not force them to be vaccinated or for example, force them to get vaccinated or get fired. Elon Musk is incredibly influential in the, in the cryptocurrency world. He's constantly tweeting about his opinions about certain cryptocurrencies versus others. He is known as a big proponent of Dogecoin. And someone who has in the past taken Tesla's assets and invested those into Bitcoin and then sold that Bitcoin at a profit. Well, I mean, I could really sort of wax on about the nature of money for hours because I played a significant role in creating PayPal. And so my understanding of the money system at a fundamental level of how it actually works, the detailed mechanics of it is I think there's there very few people that understand it better than me. Bitcoin is an interesting example obviously, the prime mover on this, but the transaction volume of Bitcoin is low, and the cost per transaction is high, it is at least at its base level, suitable for maybe an exchange a store of value, but fundamentally, Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. And even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. Why is that? The total transaction flow that you can do with Dogecoin is substantially more than, like transactions per day, is much higher than—has much higher potential than Bitcoin. It is a slightly inflationary but that inflationary number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage. Right. So that means over time, its percentage inflation actually decreases. And that's actually good because it encourages people to spend and rather than sort of hoard it as a store of value. I'm going to switch to a personal question a little bit if you're okay with that. Yeah, sure. So what happened with Grimes and do you have a new girlfriend? Oh, man. Are you seeing someone new? I know here we are with our somewhat different approach. Grimes as I said, like 70 separated, you know, like, it's just that her work, has her just being in different places a lot versus my work. So we, you know, weren't seeing each other that much. We're still—we're still good friends. And I do not have a new girlfriend or anything. Okay, yeah. I mean, this place is basically like a technology monastery, you know. Technology monastery? Yeah. There's hardly any. I mean, there's someone here, but not many. And it's remote. Yeah. And we deal to do technology. Yes. 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