Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’m currently plugging away at a big working paper with the running title, “Argumentum in Cyber-Terrorem: A Framework for Evaluating Fear Appeals in Internet Policy Debates.” It’s an attempt to bring together a number of issues I’ve discussed here in my past work on “techno-panics” and devise a framework to evaluate and address such panics [...]
Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom. In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: [...]
I’m going to close out my series of essays about Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by discussing his proposed solutions. In the first five essays in the series, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] I’ve critiqued Wu’s look at information history as well as his use of [...]
Of the many tech policy-related books I’ve read in recent years, I can’t recall ever being quite so torn over one of them as much as I have been about Jaron Lanier‘s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. There were moments while I was reading through it when I was thinking, “Yes, quite right!,” [...]
[I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I [...]
Via Kevin Kelly I see that at some point Forbes magazine produced this chart measuring technology diffusion rates for various media and communications technologies since their year of inception. I found this of great interest because, since the mid-90s, I have been putting together various charts and tables illustrating technological diffusion [most recently I did [...]
A few months ago, I penned a mega book review about the growing divide between “Internet optimists and pessimists.” I noted that the Internet optimists — people like Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Kevin Kelly, and others — believe that the Internet is generally improving our culture, economy, and society for the better. They [...]
[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: "Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society."] A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
