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 [...]
NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam had a great spot on NPR’s Morning Edition today about the disputes among social scientists over the impact of violent video games on kids. ["It's A Duel: How Do Violent Video Games Affect Kids?"] You won’t be surprised to hear I wholeheartedly agree with Texas A&M psychologist Chris Ferguson, who [...]
I enjoyed this Wall Street Journal essay by Daniel H. Wilson on “The Terrifying Truth About New Technology.” It touches on many of the themes I’ve discussed here in my essays on techno-panics, fears about information overload, and the broader battle throughout history between technology optimists and pessimists about the impact of new technologies on [...]
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: [...]
Information overload is a hot topic these days. I’ve really enjoyed recent essays by Aaron Saenz (“Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds”), Michael Sacasas (“Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World“), and Peggy Noonan (“Information Overload is Nothing New“) discussing this concern in a thoughtful way. Thoughtful discussion about this issue [...]
Over at MediaFreedom.org, a new site devoted to fighting the fanaticism of radical anti-media freedom groups like Free Press and other “media reformistas,” I’ve started rolling out a 5-part series of essays about “The Battle for Media Freedom.” In Part 1 of the series, I defined what real media freedom is all about, and in [...]
David Leonhardt of The New York Times penned an interesting essay a few days ago entitled, “Do Video Games Equal Less Crime?” reflecting upon the same FBI crime data I wrote about earlier this week, which showed rapid drops in violent crime last year (on top of years of steady declines). Crimes of all sorts [...]
[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 [...]
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 [...]
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka — (Ver. 1.0 — Summer 2009) We are attempting to articulate the core principles of cyber-libertarianism to provide the public and policymakers with a better understanding of this alternative vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace. We invite comments and suggestions regarding how we should refine and build-out this [...]
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.
