Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age
The internet as we know it is broken. Here’s how we can seize back control of our lives from the corporate algorithms and create a better internet—before it’s too late.
It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. It’s why youth suicide rates are rising, why politics has become toxic, and why our most important institutions are faltering.
Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for distributing it is corrupted at its heart. Everything comes down to our ability to communicate openly and trustfully with each other. But, thanks to the dominant digital platforms and the ways they distort human behavior, we have lost that ability—while, at the same time, we’ve been robbed of the data that is rightfully ours.
The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the
prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the
authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a
centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has
set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.
And then they describe a groundbreaking solution to reclaim it: rather than
superficial, patchwork regulations, we must reimagine the very architecture
of the internet. The resulting “third-generation internet” would replace the
status quo with a new model marked by digital property rights, autonomy, and
ownership.
Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Our Biggest Fight argues that we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow. Do it right and we will finally, properly, unlock its immense potential.
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Biggest-Fight-Reclaiming-Humanity/dp/0593728513
OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age
"As both an entrepreneur and a parent, I'm deeply concerned with how Silicon Valley's move fast and break things ethos has co-opted and corrupted the awesome power of the internet in ways that have put our society and future at risk," said McCourt. "Through OUR BIGGEST FIGHT, I hope to convey the urgency of this moment and how autocratic surveillance technology is stripping us of our personhood and causing great harms to society. By drawing on lessons of the past and redesigning what this powerful technology optimizes for, we can reclaim our ability to chart a new course and build an internet that empowers people over platforms."
Building upon McCourt's ongoing work with Project Liberty – a far-reaching, $500-million initiative to create a better, healthier internet – the book addresses the urgent, growing threat today's highly centralized internet infrastructure presents to democracy, youth mental health, and individual data rights. Described by Crown as "a resounding call to action for building a healthier and more equitable internet that frees users from Big Tech's exploitation, recognizes individuals' rights to their data, safeguards children and prioritizes the common good," OUR BIGGEST FIGHT provides a gameplan for advancing innovative solutions.
https://www.projectliberty.io/our-biggest-fight
OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age—a resounding call to action for building a healthier and more equitable internet that frees users from Big Tech's exploitation, recognizes individuals' rights to their data, safeguards children and prioritizes the common good—from Frank H. McCourt, Jr., and acclaimed journalist, Michael J. Casey.
The internet was once a utopian dream. And its impact has transformed how we live, learn, work and communicate. Despite its conveniences and connectivity, today's internet is causing real harm and is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. Instead of driving progress and collaboration, its dominant platforms are fueling a youth mental health crisis, polluting public discourse with misinformation and toxicity, eroding trust and undermining our most important institutions. Left unchecked, the internet in its current, highly centralized form—dominated by a handful of Big Tech giants that feed on our data—threatens to destabilize societies, democracies and human interaction at every level. And it will get exponentially more harmful in the age of artificial intelligence. McCourt and Casey explain how we can get off this destructive path and seize this most urgent of moments to build an internet that serves society's needs.
For decades, thought leaders and policy experts have weighed in with suggestions for fixing the internet's ills, mostly through top-down regulation. What sets McCourt and Casey apart is their relentless focus on the need to innovate our way forward and address the problem at its roots, starting with the web's underlying infrastructure. Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, OUR BIGGEST FIGHT depicts a set of compelling parallels between the American revolution and the need for a similar action today to throw off the shackles of Big Tech. Now is the time, McCourt and Casey argue, to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow.
McCourt is the executive chairman of McCourt Global, a private family company committed to building a better future and extending the McCourt family's 130-year legacy of developing infrastructure and merging community and social impact with financial results through its work across the real estate, sports & media, technology and capital investment industries, as well as its significant philanthropic activities. Named one of the Top 50 Philanthropists in the U.S. by The Chronical of Philanthropy, McCourt is the foundational donor of Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. As a fifth-generation builder, he's wary of Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" ethos and, as a father of seven, concerned about how technology is impacting children, families and communities – and putting our future at risk. Determined to carry out projects that leave a positive impact on society, McCourt is focused on Project Liberty, a bold and far-reaching effort to build an internet where individuals have more control over their data, a voice in how digital platforms operate, and more access to the economic benefits of innovation. Supported by a $500-million commitment from McCourt, Project Liberty encompasses the work of the Project Liberty Foundation—a 501(c)(3) with an international partner network that includes Georgetown University, Stanford University, Sciences Po, and other leading academic institutions and civic organizations—and Amplica Labs, a technology business launched by McCourt Global that is focused on developing the next generation of digital infrastructure.
Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for accessing, engaging and sharing it is corrupted at its heart. Rather than a free-flowing exchange of ideas in a decentralized environment, today's internet is a closed-loop system, dominated by large technology firms feeding on our individual data and using increasingly sophisticated algorithms to keep people addicted and perpetually doom scrolling. In plain but forceful language, the authors illustrate how this centralized system, controlled by a small group of for-profit entities, has set a catastrophe in motion and stripped us of our personhood. Trust is gone, hostility is on the rise and people—especially parents concerned about their kids' use of social media—are desperate for solutions.
McCourt and Casey offer much-needed hope for a better future. Optimistically and convincingly, they lay out a groundbreaking solution to reclaim what Big Tech has co-opted and corrupted: a new, decentralized model for managing information over the internet that, by its very design, puts the rights of the individuals first. They reimagine the internet as a place where the individual can choose whether or not to share their data. A place where people can reclaim their identity, digital footprint, and personal sovereignty. A place where individual rights are sacrosanct – and where tech corporations must agree to our terms of use before accessing the data, content and connections we create online.
Much like Americans have amended the U.S. Constitution in order to enshrine new rights and obligations, so too must we amend the protocols by which the internet operates. By upgrading the internet's current architecture, we can lay the foundation for a more equitable and inclusive web that prioritizes people over platforms and enables users to own and control their personal data.
McCourt and Casey make a powerful argument for acting now, before a Big Tech-driven AI transformation is complete, to build a new, open internet that works for humanity, rather than against it. Americans have an opportunity—perhaps the last one we'll ever get—to lead the world out of a mess we helped create.
BOOK EXCERPT
Billionaire Frank McCourt says the surgeon general is only half right about
the social-media mental health crisis. It’s a crisis of personhood, not
privacy
It’s “mental torture,” McCourt and Michael Casey write in “Our Biggest
Fight”: How online platforms allow algorithms to encourage antisocial
behavior.
Take the story of Walker Farriel Montgomery, a 16-year-old from Starkville, Mississippi, who loved fishing, hunting, and football. On the evening of December 1, 2022, Walker was up late, on his phone, scrolling through Instagram when a pretty girl who seemed to share some of the same contacts appeared in his message feed. She reached out to him, flattering him and enticing him with talk about football. One thing led to another and, when they opened up a video chat, she exposed herself and invited him to do the same. But the minute after he obliged her request that he perform and share a recording of a graphic act, the girl disappeared and a stranger entered the chat. The girl’s image, manipulated from footage of a porn star, had been a front for a sextortion scam. The scammer demanded that Walker pay him $1,000 and threatened that if he didn’t comply, he would send the recording to all of Walker’s contacts.
“We’re gonna destroy you if you don’t give us the money,” the scammer told him. “Everybody’s gonna disown you. Your life is over.” As Walker pleaded for mercy, his attacker started listing the names of those who would see the video. When he got to the teen’s mother’s name, it was too much. Walker went to his father’s safe, retrieved a handgun, and shot himself.
This grim story was revealed after the FBI, in a forensic investigation, unlocked the teen’s phone. The ordeal had lasted several hours and, all the while, Walker’s parents, Brian and Courtney Montgomery, had been oblivious to the fact their son was under- going such psychological torture that he turned to what he thought was the only way out. Despite the unfathomable emotional pain the Montgomery family has had to endure, Brian has endeavored to turn the experience into something constructive for the world—for society, for the rest of us. In an effort to hold platforms like Meta’s Instagram to account for their role in extortion tragedies, he joined forces with other mothers and fathers with similarly heart-wrenching stories to become an anti–Big Tech activist.
The parents with whom Brian started working have become the public face of a movement to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which seeks to compel social media platforms to maintain a safe environment for children. Some in the group have lost a child to suicide following bouts of cyberbullying. Others discovered that their children died after participating in internet fads such as the “choking challenge.” Still others learned that their teen kids overdosed on drugs provided by chat group syndicates. At the bottom of a letter urging support for KOSA, we find the names of more than seventy-five such parents and those of their deceased children.
These accounts of children’s deaths just scrape the surface of the suffering that’s out there. As cases in which lives were literally extinguished, they represent the most extreme examples in which people have been harmed by an information system that actively drives them into dangerous situations, one that strips people of their rights. But abuses don’t need to involve deaths or professional scam artists to inflict enormous harm. People have seen their lives upended by targeted shaming on social media, when influential users turned the victim’s comments or images, more often than not taken out of context, into some lesson in righteousness or embarrassment.
Mental Torture
The abuse of people’s rights online is now manifesting itself as a mental health crisis among young people. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that between 2007 and 2021, the period in which social media and smartphones became ubiquitous in our lives, suicides rose 62% among those ages 10 to 24, whereas the rate had stayed steady between 2001 and 2007. A different CDC survey of high school students revealed that 22% had “seriously considered suicide” in 2021, up from 16% in 2011, with 18% saying they’d made a suicide plan and 10% saying they’d attempted suicide at least once, compared with 13% and 8%, respectively, ten years earlier. The numbers are even more alarming for high school girls, of whom 30% said they’d seriously considered taking their lives. More than half of the girls surveyed (57%) said they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness, up from 36% in 2011.
A statistical shift of this magnitude cannot be an anomaly. So, what is the common factor? Well, we think the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, almost got it when his office noted in a 2023 advisory that a “growing body of research” showed that social media, used by 95% of all adolescents on a daily basis, has “potential harms.” The surgeon general urged that we “increase our collective understanding of the risks associated with social media use, and urgently take action to create safe and healthy digital environments that minimize harm and safeguard children’s and adolescents’ mental health and well-being during critical stages of development.”
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist whose books have done much to crystallize understanding of how social media has shaped our thoughts and actions, was disappointed with the sur- geon general’s statement. The time has passed, he argued, for equivocating on “potential harms.” Haidt offered one explanation for why, despite the very clear correlations in aggregate mental health data, some experts suggest the jury is still out on all this: It’s that empirical findings tend to focus on the direct, causal “dose-response effect” on an individual person from exposure to social media, whereas the phenomenon should be understood in terms of the wider, societal “network effect.” Rather than studying social media as if it were, say, sugar or cocaine, examining in iso- lation the impact on a single brain, Haidt urged, we should think about how this plays out for teenagers whose entire social experience is largely lived online. In a February 22, 2023 blog post reflecting on the CDC’s 2011–2021 study, Haidt offered the hypothetical examples of a 12-year-old girl in 2011 whose parents give her an iPhone 4 when most of her friends aren’t yet online and a 12-year-old girl in 2015, by which time smartphone and social media use have become widespread.
Imagine, Haidt wrote, that in 2011, “the girl spending 5 hours a day on Instagram finds her mental health declining, but her friends’ mental health is unchanged. We find a clear dose- response effect. If she were to quit Instagram, would her mental health improve? Yes.” But fast-forward to 2015, “when most girls are on Instagram and all teens are spending far less time with their friends in person . . . [and then, at that time] a 12-year-old girl decided to quit all social media platforms. Would her mental health improve? Not necessarily.” By then, if all her friends continue to spend five hours a day on the various platforms, “she’d find it difficult to stay in touch with them,” Haidt wrote. “She’d be out of the loop and socially isolated. If the isolation effect is larger than the dose-response effect, then her mental health might even get worse. When we look across thousands of girls, we might find no strong or clear correlation between time on social media and level of mental disorder. We might even find that the nonusers are more depressed and anxious than the moderate users.”
In a powerful statement of why we all must act together to fix the mental health crisis caused by our dependence on these data-controlling social media platforms, Haidt then summarized the problem: “What we see in this second case is that social media creates a cohort effect: something that happened to a whole cohort of young people, including those who don’t use social media. It also creates a trap—a collective action problem—for girls and for parents. Each girl might be worse off quitting Instagram even though all girls would be better off if everyone quit.”
Poor analysis of social media’s harms plays into the platforms’ legal defense. “We can’t be policed for what bad people say on our platforms,” they say, often citing the controversial Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code, enacted as part of the Com- munications Decency Act of 1996, which with the intent of enabling free speech exempted internet platforms from the kind of liability that, say, news publishers face for defamation and other legal challenges. “We didn’t make Walker Farriel Montgomery kill himself. A scammer did,” they would say. They’ll also contend that they pay vast sums of money to monitor, moderate, and re- move content whenever it’s found to breach their internal policies prohibiting hate speech and socially harmful disinformation. (What they avoid saying is that they outsource this moderating task to sweatshop-like places in Africa and Asia, where low-paid staff must pore through the worst of what humanity has to offer and, as a result, often suffer from mental trauma themselves.)
But, if we extrapolate from Haidt’s useful framing, social media companies’ responsibility for the mental health crisis lies not solely in specific content that induces people to harm them- selves or others but also in how their algorithms create an addictive dependence on a toxic social media environment. It’s impossible to separate Walker’s and other victims’ drastic deci- sions to end their lives from the wider social media context, with all the cyberbullying and other forms of peer pressure that it en- courages. Recognizing it from a holistic perspective—that the pain we’re all witnessing is part of an ugly overarching system—is the starting point for understanding how we’ve been stripped of our rights and how to restore them.
The pernicious way in which online platforms allow their curation algorithms to encourage antisocial behavior that erodes people’s self-esteem is, we believe, a form of mental torture. And, as with various forms of physical torture banned by the Geneva convention, it amounts to a breach of human rights. These systems are violating the sanctity of the person.
Asserting this requires a demonstration that some event in the digital realm directly led to a flesh-and-blood person’s suffering in the offline world. If you accept our and Haidt’s analysis in the preceding paragraphs, you’ll recognize that evidence of a causal link is often incontrovertible. But if you still harbor any doubt that our real-world existence can be harmed by our online experiences, we now ask you to go one step further, to recognize, as we mentioned previously, that software companies are quite literally digitizing our flesh-and-blood identity. Your biological DNA (in the form of codified genetic information) and your social DNA (as represented by records of your online behavior) are both captured in digital form and stored in centralized data serv- ers. This data is obtained by companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry, which exploit the connections that are easily made between these two versions of you. They find all sorts of ways to profit from them that you’re not privy to. Your data is also exposed to the attendant risks that come with putting sensitive information online: In October 2023, 23andMe informed customers that hackers had breached its “DNA Relatives” feature, which allows participants to compare their information with that of other participants worldwide. Who knows who now has access to those customers’ vital, highly personal information?
To be sure, the digitization of human biological information brings powerful potential benefits to society. If we start with an idea with which I’m pretty certain we all agree—that we own our biological DNA—and add to that our contention that we should own the digital version too, we can foresee a world where it can be put to positive use. Imagine the important medical breakthroughs that will be possible if we can willingly share such information in a manner that we control. Sadly, the biological data grab by Silicon Valley titans is only secondarily motivated by positive outcomes for society. It is primarily a move to shore up a dominant position in their capacity to manipulate how we communicate with one another.
One manifestation of the drive to shape our social behavior is found in what we might call the Instagram aesthetic. Scroll through TikTok or randomly explore a selection of Instagram “influencers”—a role that 57% of Americans ages 13 to 26 said they aspire to, according to a 2023 Morning Consult poll—and you’ll notice how the images tend toward conformity, even if each person posting is supposedly seeking to stand out from the crowd. It’s the same bikini-clad pose on vacation, the same Kardashian-inspired pout, the same buff body in the infinity pool framed by the sunset, the same dude who’s “crushing it” with his chin-ups. And now, with Magic Editor on Google’s Android phones, everyone can modify their smiles and backgrounds to come up with a similarly idealized look. The internet idea many of us bought into during the early 1990s was that of a network that gave every person—each with their unique voice, appearance, and expression—an input into the great pool of ideas, and that out of that rich soup of ingenuity would spring the most amazing inventions and creations. But instead we are systematically stripping people of their individuality, of their capacity for self-actualization, of their authenticity. This doesn’t feel very aligned with the American Dream to us.
By the way, if you’re over 55, we seriously hope the preceding paragraphs didn’t elicit a smugness about the younger generation’s image obsessions. Maybe you’ve never posed for an Instagram selfie on a Greek island or posted some shallow aphorism about your personal goals, but there’s an almost 100% chance, regardless, that the algorithms have got you.
Excerpted from OUR BIGGEST FIGHT by Frank H. McCourt, Jr. with Michael J. Casey. Copyright © 2024 by Frank H. McCourt, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
