ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to provide the nearly forgotten role of institutions that have, at least in theory, always aimed to serve the public good: journalism, education, and politics. Such institutions can, if stewarded faithfully, cultivate virtues like wisdom, authenticity, integrity, judgment, and memory. The worship of tech undermines the quest for human flourishing, for authentic living, for a life of integrity. All the while, tech elites may seem to get the better end of this deal, living lives of relative economic privilege at the expense of others. The problem is that tech companies tend to imagine the consequences of their work from a naïve and privileged position. The situation has become increasingly clear through the hard work of technology journalists, who have exposed the inner-workings of Silicon Valley elites in the wake of data breaches and electioneering scandals. Multitasking is an affordance of convergent, digital technologies.
