On March 19th, I had the chance to debate Franklin Foer at a Patrick Henry College event focused on the question, “Is Big Tech Big Brother?” It was billed as a debate over the role of technology in American society and whether government should be regulating media and technology platforms more generally.  [The full event video is here.] Foer is the author of the new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, in which he advocates a fairly expansive regulatory regime for modern information technology platforms. He is open to building on regulatory ideas from the past, including broadcast-esque licensing regimes, “Fairness Doctrine”-like mandates for digital intermediaries, “fiduciary” responsibilities, beefed-up antitrust intervention, and other types of controls. In a review of the book for Reason, and then again during the debate at Patrick Henry University, I offered some reflections on what we can learn from history about how well ideas like those worked out in practice.

My closing statement of the debate, which lasted just a little over three minutes, offers a concise summation of what that history teaches us and why it would be so dangerous to repeat the mistakes of the past by wandering down that disastrous path again. That 3-minute clip is posted below. (The audience was polled before and after the event and asked the same question each time: “Do large tech companies wield too much power in our economy, media and personal lives and if so, should government(s) intervene?” Apparently at the beginning, the poll was roughly Yes – 70% and No – 30%, but after the debated ended it has reversed, with only 30% in favor of intervention and 70% against. Glad to turn around some minds on this one!)

via ytCropper

Reason magazine recently published my review of Franklin Foer’s new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. My review begins as follows:

If you want to sell a book about tech policy these days, there’s an easy formula to follow. First you need a villain. Google and Facebook should suffice, but if you can throw in Apple, Amazon, or Twitter, that’s even better. Paint their CEOs as either James Bond baddies bent on world domination or naive do-gooders obsessed with the quixotic promise of innovation. Finally, come up with a juicy Chicken Little title. Maybe something like World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Wait—that one’s taken. It’s the title of Franklin Foer’s latest book, which follows this familiar techno-panic template almost perfectly.

The book doesn’t break a lot of new ground; it serves up the same old technopanicky tales of gloom-and-doom that many others have said will befall us unless  something is done to save us. But Foer’s unique contribution is to unify many diverse strands of modern tech criticism in one tome, and then amp up the volume of panic about it all. Hence, the “existential” threat in the book’s title. I bet you didn’t know the End Times were so near!

Read the rest of my review over at Reason. And, if you care to read some of my other essays on technopanics through the ages, here’s a compendium of them.

Evan Selinger, a super-sharp philosopher of technology up at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is always alerting me to interesting new essays and articles and this week he brought another important piece to my attention. It’s a short new article by Arturo Casadevall, Don Howard, and Michael J. Imperiale, entitled, “The Apocalypse as a Rhetorical Device in the Influenza Virus Gain-of-Function Debate.” The essay touches on something near and dear to my own heart: the misuse of rhetoric in debates over the risk trade-offs associated with new technology and inventions. Casadevall, Howard, and Imperiale seek to “focus on the rhetorical devices used in the debate [over infectious disease experiments] with the hope that an analysis of how the arguments are being framed can help the discussion.”

They note that “humans are notoriously poor at assessing future benefits and risks” and that this makes many people susceptible to rhetorical ploys based on the artificial inflation of risks. Their particular focus in this essay is the debate over so-called “gain-of-function” (GOF) experiments involving influenza virus, but what they have to say here about how rhetoric is being misused in that field is equally applicable to many other fields of science and the policy debates surrounding various issues. The last two paragraphs of their essay are masterful and deserve everyone’s attention:

Who has the upper hand in the GOF debate? The answer to this question will be apparent only when the history of this time is written. However, it is possible that in the near future, arguments about risk will trump arguments about benefits, because the risk of a GOF experiment unleashing a devastating epidemic plays on a well-founded human fear, while the potential benefits of the research are considerably harder to articulate. In debates about benefits and risks, arguments based on positing extreme risks, however unlikely, are powerful rhetorical devices because they play into human fears. While we all agree that the risk of a GOF experiment unleashing a deadly epidemic is not zero, such an event would be at the extreme end of the likely outcomes from GOF experimentation. Arguing against GOF on the basis of pandemic dangers is a powerful rhetorical device because anyone can understand it. The problem with the use of apocalyptic scenarios in risk-benefit analysis is that they invoke the possibility for infinite suffering, irrespective of the probability of such an event, and the prospect of infinite suffering can potentially overwhelm any good obtained from knowledge gained from such experiments. Repeatedly invoking the apocalypse can create a sophistry that we call the apocalyptic fallacy, which, when applied in a vacuum of evidence and theory, proposes consequences that are so dire, however low the probability, that this tactic can be employed to quash any new invention, technique, procedures, and/or policy. The apocalyptic fallacy is an effective rhetorical tool that is meaningless in the absence of objective numbers. We remind those who invoke the apocalypse that the DNA revolution went on to deliver a multitude of benefits without unleashing the fears of Asilomar and that the large hadron collider was turned on, the Higgs boson was discovered, the standard model in physics was validated, and we are still here. Hence, we caution individuals against overreliance on the apocalypse in the debates ahead, for rhetoric can win the day, but rhetoric never gave us a single medical advance.

This is spot-on and, again, has applicability in many other arenas. Indeed, it aligns quite nicely with what I had to say about the use and misuse of rhetoric in information technology debates in my recent law review article on “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle” (Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter 2013). In that piece, I began by noting that:

Fear is an extremely powerful motivational force. In public policy debates, appeals to fear are often used in an attempt to sway opinion or bolster the case for action. Such appeals are used to convince citizens that  threats to individual or social well-being may be avoided only if specific steps are taken. Often these steps take the form of anticipatory regulation based on the precautionary principle. Such “fear appeal arguments” are frequently on display in the Internet policy arena and often take the form of a fullblown “moral panic” or “technopanic.”  These panics are intense public, political, and academic responses to the emergence or use of media or technologies, especially by the young.  In the extreme, they result in regulation or censorship. While cyberspace has its fair share of troubles and troublemakers, there is no evidence that the Internet is leading to greater problems for society than previous technologies did. That has not stopped some from suggesting there are reasons to be particularly fearful of the Internet and new digital technologies. There are various individual and institutional factors at work that perpetuate fear-based reasoning and tactics.

I continued on to document the structure of “fear appeal” arguments, and then outlined how those arguments can be deconstructed and refuted using sound analysis and real-world evidence. The logic pattern behind fear appeal arguments looks something like this (as documented by Douglas Walton, in his outstanding textbook, Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation):

• Fearful Situation Premise: Here is a situation that is fearful to you.
• Conditional Premise: If you carry out A, then the negative consequences portrayed in this fearful situation will happen to you.
• Conclusion: You should not carry out A.

In the field of rhetoric and argumentation, this logic pattern is referred to as argumentum in terrorem or argumentum ad metum. A closely related variant of this argumentation scheme is known as argumentum ad baculum, or an argument based on a threat. Argumentum ad baculum literally means “argument to the stick,” and the logic pattern in this case looks like this (again, according to Walton’s book on the subject):

• Conditional Premise: If you do not bring about A, then consequence B will occur.
• Commitment Premise: I commit myself to seeing to it that B will come about.
• Conclusion: You should bring about A.

The problem is that these logic patterns and rhetorical devices are logical fallacies or are based on outright myths. Once you start carefully unpacking arguments based on this logic pattern and applying reasoned, evidenced-based analysis, you can quickly show why the premise is not valid.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop some people (including a great many policymakers) from utilizing such faulty logic or misguided rhetorical devices. Even worse, as I note in my paper, is that,

fear appeals are facilitated by the use of threat inflation. Specifically, threat inflation involves the use of fear-inducing rhetoric to inflate artificially the potential harm a new development or technology poses to certain classes of the population, especially children, or to society or the economy at large. These rhetorical flourishes are empirically false or at least greatly blown out of proportion relative to the risk in question.

I then go on for many pages in my paper to document the use of fear appeals and threat inflation in a variety of information technology debates. I show that in every case where such tactics are common, they are unjustified once the evidence is evaluated dispassionately.  Regrettably, those who employ fear tactics and use threat inflation often don’t care because they know exactly what they are doing: The use of apocalyptic rhetoric grabs attention and sometimes ends serious deliberation. It is often an intentional ploy to scare people into action (or perhaps just into silence), even if that result is not based on a reasoned, level-headed evaluation of all the facts on hand.

The lesson here is simple: The ends do not justify the means. No matter how passionately you feel about a particular policy issue — even those that you perhaps believe potentially involve life and death ramifications — it is wise to avoid the use of apocalyptic rhetoric. Generally speaking, the sky is not falling and when one insists that it is, they should be backing up their assertions with a substantial body of evidence. Otherwise, they are just using fear appeal arguments and apocalyptic rhetoric to unnecessarily scare people and end all serious debate over issues that are likely far more complex and nuanced than their rhetoric suggests.

[For all my essays on “technopanics,” moral panics, and threat inflation, see this compendium I have assembled.]

I was honored to be asked by the editors at Reason magazine to be a part of their “Revolutionary Reading” roundup of “The 9 Most Transformative Books of the Last 45 Years.”  Reason is celebrating its 45th anniversary and running a wide variety of essays looking back at how liberty has fared over the past half-century. The magazine notes that “Statism has hardly gone away, but the movement to roll it back is stronger than ever.” For this particular feature, Reason’s editors “asked seven libertarians to recommend some of the books in different fields that made [the anti-statist] cultural and intellectual revolution possible.”

When Jesse Walker of Reason first contacted me about contributing my thoughts about which technology policy books made the biggest difference, I told him I knew exactly what my choices would be: Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Technologies of Freedom (1983) and Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies (1998). Faithful readers of this blog know all too well how much I love these two books and how I am constantly reminding people of their intellectual importance all these years later. (See, for example, this and this.) All my thinking and writing about tech policy over the past two decades has been shaped by the bold vision and recommendations set forth by Pool and Postrel in these beautiful books.

As I note in my Reason write-up of the books:

The past 45 years have seen remarkable advances in information technology: the Internet, mobile communications, ubiquitous news and entertainment options, and much more. What made these and other innovations possible was a general openness to the unplanned, the unpredictable, and even the uncontrollable. In our willingness to embrace a world of uncertainty and incessant change, we found unparalleled technological abundance. No two books more eloquently captured and celebrated the information age than Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Technologies of Freedom and Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies.

And I conclude by noting that “While plenty of tech pundits and academics cling to… stasist thinking today, Pool and Postrel’s books continue to provide beacons for a better world, free from the top-down, technocratic mentality and prescriptions of the past. At least thus far, permissionless innovation has largely trumped the precautionary principle in tech policy. Let’s hope the dynamist vision can hold the line for another 45 years.”

Head over to Reason to read the rest of my essay as well as all the other excellent books that contributors have recommended as part of the symposium.  There are some really great selections in there.

And if you care about the future of technological freedom and human liberty and progress more generally, please do read (or re-read) both Pool and Postrel’s books when you have a chance.  They changed my life and they will change yours, too.

The folks at Reason magazine were kind enough to invite me to submit a review of Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires based on my 6-part series on the book that I posted here on the TLF late last year. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)  My new essay, which is entitled “The Rise of Cybercollectivism,” has now been posted on the Reason website.

I realize that title will give some readers heartburn, even those who are inclined to agree with me much the time.  After all, “collectivism” is a term that packs some rhetorical punch and leads to quick accusations of red-baiting. I addressed that concern in a Cato Unbound debate with Lawrence Lessig a couple of years ago after he strenuously objected to my use of that term to describe his worldview (and that of Tim Wu, Jonathan Zittrain, and their many colleagues and followers). As I noted then, however, the “collectivism” of which I speak is a more generic type, not the hard-edged Marxist brand of collectivism of modern times. For example, I do not believe that Professors Lessig, Zittrain, or Wu are out to socialize all the information means of production and send us all to digital gulags or anything silly like that. Rather, their “collectivism” is rooted in a more general desire to have–as Declan McCullagh eloquently stated in a critique of Lessig’s Code–rule by “technocratic philosopher kings.” Here’s a passage from my Reason review of Wu’s Master Switch in which I expand upon that notion:

What’s perhaps most troubling about The Master Switch is something it shares with Lessig’s book: a concerted effort to redefine “Internet freedom.” In the Lessig-Zittrain-Wu construction of Internet freedom, technocrats liberate us from the supposed tyranny of the marketplace and what Lessig calls “code failure.” High-tech entrepreneurs are cast as villains; their innovations are viewed as threats to our liberties. When challenged, Wu, Lessig, and Zittrain all vehemently reject the notion that their outlook is pessimistic. They occasionally insist that they are actually libertarians at heart. But a plain reading of Lessig, Zittrain, and Wu provides little cause for optimism. Unless someone or something—usually the state—intervenes, they warn, the Net and all things digital are doomed. “Not only can the government take these steps to reassert its power to regulate, but…it should,” argues Lessig. “Government should push the architecture of the Net to facilitate its regulation, or else it will suffer what can only be described as a loss of sovereignty.”

Wu’s book has a very concrete regulatory vision in this regard (even though, strangely, he insists it really isn’t regulation at all). As I noted in my essay last week following his appointment as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, Wu wants a so-called “Separations Principle” to govern our modern information economy. It would require that all information providers be segregated into three buckets–creators, distributors, and hardware makers–and then kept strictly compartmentalized. He proposes this in the name of keeping private power in check, which he regards as the primary threat to the information economy, not the government. This is very much in line with the thinking we see in Lessig and Zittrain’s work.  Here’s how I summarize this thinking in my Reason piece:

Wu and other progressives don’t always come right out and say it, but they often suggest that private power, however defined, is so persistently insidious that the only way to counteract it is by greatly amplifying state power. We see that yearning for a stronger state in Wu’s suggestion that “the disposition of firms and industries is, if anything, more critical than the actions of the state in controlling who gets heard” and in his audacious regulatory solutions, which would greatly enhance the government’s power over the information economy.

For these reasons, I believe the “cyber-collectivism” label is appropriate. They want to collectivize (or politicize) decisions that some of us believe are ultimately better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up, marketplace responses and evolving social norms.

At this point, some might ask: Do we need such labels at all? As a philosophy junkie, I think such labels and classifications play a useful didactic role. After all, something quite profound separates these different camps and leads to endless squabbles about nearly every aspect of technology policy. Consequently, my attempt to identify leading schools of thinking about Internet policy issues is not an effort to disparage but, rather, simply an exercise in philosophical classification to help us frame ongoing investigations of these issues in a more rational manner.

I am certainly open to other classification suggestions.”Cyber-progressive” might be one option that packs less of a perceived punch than “cyber-collectivist.” I’ve also used the term “cyber social Democrat” and “openness evangelicals” to describe this movement, although both labels have serious shortcomings.

As for myself, I have made no bones about my affiliation with what might be labeled the “cyber-libertarian” school of thought. Clearly, we’re a small band of brothers, and we are currently being utterly crushed in these intellectual debates by the cyber-progressives, who dominate almost all major university cyberlaw and Internet policy programs. Nonetheless, despite having so few adherents, I still think it is fair to identify cyber-libertarianism as a distinct school of thinking.

I think we’re also seeing the emergence of a clear school of thinking that we’ll eventually label “cyber-conservative,” as Jerry Brito alluded to in his post about “What Cablegate Tells Us about Cyber-Conservatism.” I think the defining characteristics for the cyber-conservative, as with conservatism more generally, can be boiled down to security, stability, moderation, and a healthy respect for tradition.  Conservatives occasionally place a high value on liberty in certain economic contexts, but when it conflicts too violently with those other principles, liberty typically gives way to planning. We see this in debates over many national security matters, some privacy discussions, and certain “faith and family” issues. Interestingly, however, conservative principles have never really taken hold in a unified or coherent way within the realm of technology policy, and it’s difficult to point to many scholars who would clearly fit under the “cyber-conservative” banner.  But I think that is changing today because of rising concerns about state secrets, cyber war, the ubiquity of content considered morally objectionable by many, fears about declining  “social order,” and so on. [See my comments on Rob Atkinson’s Who’s Who in Internet Politics for more discussion about cyber-conservatism.]

Do you have better labels for these philosophical schools of thinking about Internet policy matters? If so, I’m all ears.

Additional Reading:

• Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom
• The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 2 – Saving the Net From Its Supporters
• Thoughts on Wu, Part 5: What Ultimately Separates the Cyber-Libertarian & Cyber-Collectivist
• Cato Unbound debate with Lessig, Part 1: Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of “Perfect Control” & Part 2: “Our Conflict of Visions.”

Jesse Walker has a terrific feature story looking “Beyond the Fairness Doctrine” in this month’s issue of Reason magazine. I highly recommend it. It’s an in-depth exploration of what an Obama Administration means for the future of tech and media policy. Walker rightly opens the piece by noting that “The fairness doctrine is still dead, and it probably will stay dead even if Barack Obama becomes president.” The danger, however, is that an Obama FCC will still pursue a variety of onerous regulatory objectives that could do a great deal of damage to markets and free speech.

Walker touches upon the various issues that will likely be a priority for an Obama Administration and the Left-leaning media reformistas like Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, and New America Foundation. Those policy issues include: net neutrality, “localism” mandates and increased “community oversight” regulations, media ownership rules, minority ownership requirements, increased merger meddling, spectrum policy, and other new “public interest” obligations.

Of course, as Walker also correctly points out, it is difficult to see how things could get much worse than they have been under Bush Administration’s FCC and the leadership of Chairman Kevin Martin.  Walker was kind enough to quote my thoughts on this point: “Martin is the most regulatory Republican FCC Chairman in decades,” I told him. “He wants to control speech and will use whatever tools he has to get there.”

I stand by those words, but I am also aware that things could get worse — much worse — under a Democratic FCC influenced by radical Leftist activists like Free Press.  Indeed, in our new book A Manifesto for Media Freedom, Brian Anderson and I inventory the many looming threats to media and technology freedom that exist today and show how most of them arise from the Left.  As Walker notes in his article, however, it is unlikely that a re-empowered Democratic FCC would come right out of the gates with the same sort of command-and-control approaches they’ve employed in the past.  And we’ll still have to worry about some right-of-center lawmakers and regulatory joining some of these misguided campaigns. “The real danger,” Walker concludes in his piece, “is more subtle and more mundane.  It’s a bipartisan bureaucracy slowly, steadily increasing its power.”    Make sure to read Jesse’s entire piece.  Great stuff.

Over at Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog, Matt Welch has penned a piece pointing out how it is impossible to make the anti-media activists happy. Welch notes that radical activist groups like Free Press go around demonizing media moguls like Rupert Murdoch because he supposedly symbolizes the fact that will live in an age of media monopolists who puppeteer all our news and entertainment from on high. It’s all 100% B.S., of course, as we have shown here again and again.

But even when confronted by the rise of alternative owners and ownership models, the Free Press fanatics show their true colors by saying that won’t work for them either. Walsh notes, for example, that the skake-up of the old Tribune empire and the emergence of Sam Zell as an independent owner of the Trib — and an owner hellbent on downsizing the old empire, no less — should be exactly what Free Press wants:

So along comes a decidedly unfaceless individualist who buys a newspaper company anchored in his two hometowns ? Chicago and Los Angeles ? and promptly takes it off the stock exchange, even making employees his partners. Instead of expanding his new company’s empire, he sells various pieces off, thus diluting whatever “opoly” we’re on now. All the while mandating more local coverage. Shall we try to guess how the StopBigMedia coalition has reacted to Sam Zell? The Chicago Reader’s Michael Miner talks to various media grumpuses, including Free Press Executive Director Josh Silver, and discovers that Zell is the new, woefully inappropriate poster boy for anti-media consolidation.

Here’s what Silver has to say about Zell:

“He insults journalists and journalism at virtually every whistle stop on his tour,” Silver replied, referring to Zell’s visits to Tribune Company properties. “He says it’s not about democracy ? it’s about profits. The American public and policy makers have to decide whether journalism is produced purely for the reaping of profit or if it’s a central component to a functioning participatory democracy. “And based on the answer to that question,” Silver went on, “you make policy accordingly. There is no such thing as a deregulated media policy system. The only question is, will the media be regulated for the largest media corporations or regulated on behalf of the American public. That’s what all of our anticonsolidation efforts are about.”

Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader points out why this is so silly:

If Zell would shut up, critics like Silver and [Bill] Moyers might notice that he makes a lousy poster boy for big media. He took the Tribune Company private and made its employees nominal co-owners. He’s not acquiring properties — he’s selling them off. America has always had it both ways about that choice Silver thinks the nation needs to make: journalism for profit or journalism for democracy. Zell has loudly and rudely told his staffs that from where he sits the second is predicated on the first, and turning a profit is something he knows a little more about than they do.

So if the Free Press folks don’t want Murdoch on the one hand, or Zell on the other, what do they want? As Ben Compaine notes, “What the hard core reformistas really want, it seems, is not diversity or an open debate but a media that promotes their own vision of society and the world.” That’s exactly right and, more specifically, as I argued in my Media Myths book, the media reformistas want to impose this control by borrowing the fantasy that “the public owns the [broadcast] airwaves” and extending it to ALL media platforms and outlets. In other words, Free Press wants an UnFree Press. To cast things in neo-Marxists terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production.

Don’t take my word for it? Well, then, listen to Robert McChesney. He is the godfather of the media reformista movement, the founder of Free Press, and an avowed socialist. And he has made his intentions in this regard abundantly clear throughout his prolific career. In his book Rich Media, Poor Media, he says that “Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement.” He casts everything in “social justice” terms and speaks of the need “to rip the veil off [corporate] power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and as egalitarian as possible.”

What exactly does all that mean in practice for media and media operators? In his book Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle against Corporate Media with John Nichols of The Nation, McChesney argues that media reform efforts must begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media.” They go on to state that, “Our claim is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”

Sure, whatever you say, guys. If we just put you and your UnFree Press buddies in control, the media world would be perfect. We’d have plenty of choice and abundant viewpoints represented. Oh, wait a minute, we already have that today!! It’s just that they don’t like the fact that THEIR particular socialist viewpoints are not more widely accepted throughout the media marketplace. Well, tough luck. Hey, I don’t like that fact that not everyone on the nightly news or talking head shows isn’t spreading my libertarian gospel to the world, but I would never be so arrogant as to force them to do so as the UnFree Press reformistas would like to do using the coercive power of Big Government to bend media to their will.