Lost in the Super Market is a collection of essays released by American Compass exploring the digital revolution and the attendant challenges this upheaval has brought.
How do we make sure this moment of progress and opportunity can be pressed to our collective benefit rather than undermine our societal guardrails?
The collection offers guidance to policymakers on how to deal with these sudden and massive technological changes that will and already are reshaping nearly every aspect of life.
As Oren Cass, author and executive director of American Compass, writes in the foreword:
“The digital revolution has transformed our civilization as dramatically as the industrial revolution two centuries earlier. Personal computing and ubiquitous connectivity change how information is created, stored, shared, applied, and consumed, upending the basic assumptions on which our market, our democracy, and our society have relied.”
The essays within focus on three areas of particular concern:
- Frictionless exchange: What happens to markets as the digital age improves their efficiency and introduces them to new domains?
- Attention economy: What happens to media as the digital age enhances their ability to engage consumers?
- All-knowing algorithms: What happens to personal data as the digital age deepens their quality, widens their availability, and creates new uses for them?
