Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Last week, science writer Michael Shermer tweeted out this old xkcd comic strip that I had somehow missed before. Shermer noted that it represented, “another reply to pessimists bemoaning modern technologies as soul-crushing and isolating.” Similarly, there’s this meme that has been making the rounds on Twitter and which jokes about how newspapers made us as antisocial in the past much as newer technologies supposedly do today.
The UN has created several multilateral mechanisms to pursue those objectives, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Biological Weapons Convention. Progress on these fronts has always been slow and limited, however. The Secretary-General observed that nuclear non-proliferation efforts have recently “descended into fractious deadlock,” but the effectiveness of those and similar UN-led efforts have long been challenged by the dual realities of (1) rapid ongoing technological change that has made WMDs more ubiquitous than ever, plus (2) a general lack of teeth in UN treaties and accords to do much to slow those advances, especially among non-signatories.
Despite those challenges, the Secretary-General is right to remain vigilant about the horrors of chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. But what was interesting about this address is that the Secretary-General continued on to discuss his concerns about a rising class of emerging technologies, which we usually don’t hear mentioned in the same breath as those traditional “weapons of mass destruction”: Continue reading →
“The quickest way to find out who your enemies are is to try doing something new.” Thus begins Innovation and Its Enemies, an ambitious new book by Calestous Juma that will go down as one of the decade’s most important works on innovation policy.
Juma, who is affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has written a book that is rich in history and insights about the social and economic forces and factors that have, again and again, lead various groups and individuals to oppose technological change. Juma’s extensive research documents how “technological controversies often arise from tensions between the need to innovate and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order, and stability” (p. 5) and how this tension is “one of today’s biggest policy challenges.” (p. 8)
What Juma does better than any other technology policy scholar to date is that he identifies how these tensions develop out of deep-seated psychological biases that eventually come to affect attitudes about innovations among individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. “Public perceptions about the benefits and risks of new technologies cannot be fully understood without paying attention to intuitive aspects of human psychology,” he correctly observes. (p. 24) Continue reading →
In their paper, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy,” my Mercatus Center colleagues Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins warned of the dangers of “threat inflation” in cybersecurity policy debates. In early 2011, Mercatus also published a paper by Sean Lawson, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, entitled “Beyond Cyber Doom” that documented how fear-based tactics and cyber-doom scenarios and rhetoric increasingly were on display in cybersecurity policy debates. Finally, in my recent Mercatus Center working paper, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” I extended their threat inflation analysis and developed a comprehensive framework offering additional examples of, and explanations for, threat inflation in technology policy debates.
These papers make it clear that a sort of hysteria has developed around cyberwar and cybersecurity issues. Frequent allusions are made in cybersecurity debates to the potential for a “Digital Pearl Harbor,” a “cyber cold war,” a “cyber Katrina,” or even a “cyber 9/11.” These analogies are made even though these historical incidents resulted in death and destruction of a sort not comparable to attacks on digital networks. Others refer to “cyber bombs” even though no one can be “bombed” with binary code. And new examples of such inflationary rhetoric seem to emerge each day. Continue reading →
I’ve just had a new article published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in which I make the case against “techno-panics,” which refers to public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. The article is entitled “Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” and it appears in the July 2009 Inside ALEC newsletter. This is something I have spent a lot of time writing about here in recent years (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and I finally got around to putting it altogether in a concise essay here. I have pasted the full text below. [And I just want to send a shout-out to my friend Anne Collier of Net Family News.org, whose work on this topic has been very influential on my thinking.]
“Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” by Adam Thierer
A cursory review of the history of media and communications technologies reveals a reoccurring cycle of “techno-panics” — public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. From the waltz to rock-and-roll to rap music, from movies to comic books to video games, from radio and television to the Internet and social networking websites, every new media format or technology has spawned a fresh debate about the potential negative effects they might have on kids.
Inevitably, fueled by media sensationalism and various activist groups, these social and cultural debates quickly become political debates. Indeed, each of the media technologies or outlets mentioned above was either regulated or threatened with regulation at some point in its history. And the cycle continues today. During recent sessions of Congress, countless hearings were held and bills introduced on a wide variety of media and content-related issues. These proposals dealt with broadcast television and radio programming, cable and satellite television content, video games, the Internet, social networking sites, and much more. State policymakers, especially state Attorneys General (AGs), have also joined in such crusades on occasion. The recent push by AGs for mandatory age verification for all social networking sites is merely the latest example.
What is perhaps most ironic about these techno-panics is how quickly yesterday’s boogeyman becomes tomorrow’s accepted medium, even as the new villains replace old ones. For example, the children of the 1950s and 60s were told that Elvis’s hip shakes and the rock-and-roll revolution would make them all the tools of the devil. They grew up fine and became parents themselves, but then promptly began demonizing rap music and video games in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And now those aging Pac Man-era parents are worried sick about their kids being abducted by predators lurking on MySpace and Facebook. We shouldn’t be surprised if, a decade or two from now, today’s Internet generation will be decrying the dangers of virtual reality.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
