Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
My thanks to both Maria H. Andersen and Michael Sacasas for their thoughtful responses to my recent Forbes essay on “10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution.” They both go point by point through my Top 10 list and offer an alternative way of looking at each of the trends I [...]
2009 was not as big of a year for Internet and information technology (“info-tech”) policy books as 2008 was, but there were still some notable titles released that offered interesting perspectives about the future of the Net and the impact the Digital Revolution is having on our lives, culture, and economy. So, like last year, [...]
I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before [...]
Last month, National Review magazine published a review that I penned of Mark Helprin’s new book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. Helprin’s book is both a passionate defense of copyright law as well as a mini-autobiography. Helprin is one of the great novelists and essayists of the past half-century, and his book A Soldier of [...]
My problem with what Nick Carr is saying about Wikipedia here — as well as in his book The Big Switch – is that he always seems to assume that Wikipedia constitutes the totality of most searches for information online. I suppose it does for some people, but I have a hard time accepting the [...]
President-elect Barack Obama will soon be naming Cass Sunstein, an old friend of his from their University of Chicago Law School days together, the new head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA oversees regulation throughout the U.S. government. Basically, Sunstein’s position is the equivalent of the federal regulatory czar. Sunstein [...]
It’s been a big year for tech policy books. Several important titles were released in 2008 that offer interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet and the impact digital technologies are having on our lives, culture, and economy. Back in September, I compared some of the most popular technology policy books of the past [...]
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 [...]
I just finished reading through The Economist’s new 14-page special report on cloud computing, “Let It Rise” in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important: The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the [...]
Of the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel’s new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
