How Big Tech is POISONING Our Minds...and Democracy.

Americans are being behaviorally and mentally manipulated by profit-seeking oligarchs. Can we stop them?

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The Rising: Rep. Jake Auchincloss Breaks Down Big Tech

On this week’s episode of The Rising, one of the smartest members of the Democratic Party joined the show to discuss how Big Tech is engaging in “attention fracking” to manipulate our minds.

WATCH:

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Freedom from Manipulation

For most of American history, the great struggles over freedom were about what could be said, done, or believed in public life. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from oppression.

But in the twenty-first century, we’re waking up to a new kind of freedom struggle - the fight for freedom from manipulation.

For the first time, the most powerful systems shaping human behavior aren’t governments or religions or even media companies in the old sense. They’re invisible networks of code - algorithmic systems designed to harvest and monetize our attention. The product isn’t news or entertainment anymore. The product is us.

As Rep. Jake Auchincloss calls it, this is “attention fracking.” Just as oil companies extract energy from the earth, tech giants extract focus from our minds - drilling into our habits, our insecurities, our outrage. Thom Hartmann calls the same process “behavioral control.” Different metaphors, same reality: a business model that profits when we stay angry, distracted, and divided.

This isn’t an anti-technology argument. It’s a pro-autonomy one.

The internet is one of humanity’s greatest inventions - but its current incentive structure has turned it into a public-health and civic-health crisis. An MIT study found that lies travel six times faster than truths on social media. Trust in mainstream news has collapsed from 75 percent half a century ago to 28 percent today. These are not random trends. They are design outcomes.

Algorithms that maximize “engagement” are, by definition, optimizing for emotional intensity - for the posts most likely to keep us scrolling. The byproduct is outrage, paranoia, and despair. The result is a population easier to manipulate and a democracy harder to sustain.

If we want to save democracy, we have to save attention - and that means changing the rules of the digital economy. Auchincloss argues that social-media companies should have a duty of care, the same way chemical companies can’t dump toxins into rivers. Hartmann goes further, calling for open-source algorithms and a shift away from ad-driven business models entirely. Both are right that the status quo is unsustainable.

Freedom of expression has always depended on something deeper - the ability to think freely, to deliberate without distortion. When that capacity is hacked, speech itself becomes meaningless. The task now is not to silence anyone, but to build the conditions where genuine dialogue can happen again.

Regulation, in this sense, isn’t censorship; it’s restoration. It’s about cleaning up a polluted information ecosystem so that free will and civic trust can breathe again. The next frontier of freedom isn’t what we’re allowed to say - it’s what we’re allowed to see, to feel, to believe without manipulation.

If America’s first revolution was about self-government, the next one may be about self-governance - reclaiming sovereignty over our own attention. That’s the real fight for freedom now.

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