Back in December, I wrote about a good article in Democracy by Beth Simone Noveck, director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School. Her article highlighted the Peer-to-Patent experiment being conducted with the Patent and Trademark Office.
A response has now been published by Andrew Keen, a critic of all things 2.0 heretofore unknown to me – and for good reason. Keen’s response is drivel.
He alternately overreads and nitpicks Noveck’s article. Nowhere in her argument for infusing administrative processes with more information, for example, did she argue for changing the republican form of our government or diminishing constititional rights. But Keen’s careening response says:
The critical issue, to which Noveck and the digital populists don’t face up, is that more political participation neither means better democracy, nor does it guarantee more efficient government. In fact, it often results in the reverse: Mob rule is mob rule, whether it is electromagnetically broadcasted on the wireless or digitally streamed from the Web.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.