Everywhere you look in tech policy land these days, people decry China as a threat to America’s technological supremacy or our national security. Many of these claims are well-founded, while others are somewhat overblown. Regardless, as I argue in a new piece for National Review this week, “America Won’t Beat China by Becoming China.” Many pundits and policymakers seem to think that only a massive dose of central planning and Big Government technocratic bureaucracy can counter the Chinese threat. It’s a recipe for a great deal of policy mischief.

Some of these advocates for a ‘let’s-be-more-like-China’ approach to tech policy also engage in revisionist histories about America’s recent success stories in the personal computing revolution and internet revolution. As I note in my essay, “[t]he revisionists instead prefer to believe that someone high up in government was carefully guiding this decentralized innovation. In the new telling of this story, deregulation had almost nothing to do with it.” In fact, I was asked by  National Review to write this piece in response to a recent essay by Wells King of American Compass, who has penned some rather remarkable revisionist tales of government basically being responsible for all the innovation in digital tech sectors over the past quarter century. Markets and venture capital had nothing to do with it by his reasoning. It’s what Science writer Matt Ridley correctly labels “innovation creationism,” or the notion that it basically takes a village to raise an innovator.

Perhaps the best example of this sort of twisted logic was President Barack Obama’s infamous 2012 “you didn’t build that” speech, which was widely mocked by many conservatives at the time as being completely off the mark. The conservative critics rightly lambasted Obama for underplaying the role of markets, entrepreneurs, and private investors as the primary engine of America’s remarkably innovative economy. Unfortunately, however, many of today’s “national conservatives” are borrowing Obama’s twisted revisionist vision and, worse yet, fabricating entirely new nonsensical ‘it-takes-a-village’ narratives that go well beyond it.

In my essay, I explain why innovation creationism about the internet and the Digital Revolution gets the story of the past quarter century horribly wrong. The tech revisionist misidentify and overplay the role government played in this arena and they also ignore the many mistakes our government and other governments (especially in Europe) have made when trying to technocratically plan tech systems. As I conclude in my essay,

America’s world-leading digital-technology companies and technologies were not the product of intentional design or bureaucratic initiatives. Corporatism and central planning should be rejected as the basis for U.S. technology policy. And regardless of whether they happen to be trendy right now, economically illiterate arguments like King’s should be relegated to the ash heap of history.

Jump over to  National Review to read the entire essay.  And here’s a list of some of my other recent writing on industrial policy:

• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Does the US Need a More Targeted Industrial Policy for AI & High-Tech?” Mercatus Center Research Paper, November 17, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Book Review: ‘Questioning the Entrepreneurial State,’” April 26, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Thoughts on the America COMPETES Act: The Most Corporatist & Wasteful Industrial Policy Ever,” January 26, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “The Coming Industrial Policy Hangover,” The Hill, February 16, 2022.
• Podcast: “What’s Wrong with Industrial Policy,” Hold These Truths with Rep. Dan Crenshw, February 16, 2022.
• Tad DeHaven and Adam Thierer, “The Military-Industrial Complex Offers a Cautionary Tale for Industrial Policy Planning,” Discourse, March 25, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Government Planning and Spending Won’t Replicate Silicon Valley,” Discourse, August 18, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “To Promote Tech Hubs Across the Country, Governments Should Focus on Improving the General Business Environment,” Discourse, September 9, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy as ‘Casino Economics‘,” The Hill, July 12, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse,” Discourse, June 28, 2021.
• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Should the U.S. Copy China’s Industrial Policy?” Discourse, March 11, 2021.
• Connor Haaland & Adam Thierer, “Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?” Discourse, February 11, 2021.
• Matthew D. Mitchell and Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy is a Very Old, New Idea,” Discourse, April 6, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy Advocates Should Learn from Don Lavoie,” Discourse, November 5, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “On Defining ‘Industrial Policy,’” Technology Liberation Front, September 3, 2020.
• Adam Thierer, “Skeptical Takes on Expansive Industrial Policy Efforts,” Technology Liberation Front, March 15, 2021.

A growing number of conservatives are calling for Big Government censorship of social media speech platforms. Censorship proposals are to conservatives what price controls are to radical leftists: completely outlandish, unworkable, and usually unconstitutional fantasies of controlling things that are ultimately much harder to control than they realize. And the costs of even trying to impose and enforce such extremist controls are always enormous.

Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal ran a response I wrote to a proposal set forth by columnist Peggy Noonan in which she proposed banning everyone under 18 from all social-media sites (“We Can Protect Children and Keep the Internet Free,” Apr. 15). I expanded upon that letter in an essay here entitled, “Should All Kids Under 18 Be Banned from Social Media?” National Review also recently published an article penned by Christine Rosen in which she also proposes to “Ban Kids from Social Media.” And just this week, Zach Whiting of the Texas Public Policy Foundation published an essay on “Why Texas Should Ban Social Media for Minors.”

I’ll offer a few more thoughts here in addition to what I’ve already said elsewhere. First, here is my response to the Rosen essay. National Review gave me 250 words to respond to her proposal:

While admitting that “law is a blunt instrument for solving complicated social problems,” Christine Rosen (“Keep Them Offline,” June 27) nonetheless downplays the radicalness of her proposal to make all teenagers criminals for accessing the primary media platforms of their generation. She wants us to believe that allowing teens to use social media is the equivalent of letting them operate a vehicle, smoke tobacco, or drink alcohol. This is false equivalence. Being on a social-media site is not the same as operating two tons of steel and glass at speed or using mind-altering substances. Teens certainly face challenges and risks in any new media environment, but to believe that complex social pathologies did not exist before the Internet is folly. Echoing the same “lost generation” claims made by past critics who panicked over comic books and video games, Rosen asks, “Can we afford to lose another generation of children?” and suggests that only sweeping nanny-state controls can save the day. This cycle is apparently endless: Those “lost generations” grow up fine, only to claim it’s the  next generation that is doomed! Rosen casually dismisses free-speech concerns associated with mass-media criminalization, saying that her plan “would not require censorship.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Rosen’s prohibitionist proposal would deny teens the many routine and mostly beneficial interactions they have with their peers online every day. While she belittles media literacy and other educational and empowerment-based solutions to online problems, those approaches continue to be a better response than the repressive regulatory regime she would have Big Government impose on society.

I have a few more things to say beyond these brief comments.

First, as I alluded to in my short response to Rosen, we’ve heard similar “lost generation” stories before. Rosen might as well be channeling the ghost of Dr. Fredric Wertham (author of Seduction of the Innocent), who in the 1950s declared comics books a public health menace and lobbied lawmakers to restrict teen access to them, insisting such comics were “the cause of a psychological mutilation of children.” The same sort of “lost generation” predictions were commonplace in countless anti-video game screeds of the 1990s. Critics were writing books with titles like Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill and referring to video games as “murder simulators,” Ironically, just as the video game panic was heating up, juvenile crime rates were plummeting. But that didn’t stop the pundits and policymakers from suggesting that an entire generation of so-called “vidiots” were headed for disaster. (See my 2019 short history: “Confessions of a ‘Vidiot’: 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics“).

It is consistently astonishing to me how, as I noted in 2012 essay, “We Always Sell the Next Generation Short.” There seems to be a never-ending cycle of generational mistrust. “There has probably never been a generation since the Paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past,” notes Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist.

For example, in 1948, the poet T. S. Eliot declared: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.” We’ve heard parents (and policymakers) make similar claims about every generation since then.

What’s going on here? Why does this cycle of generational pessimism and mistrust persist? In a 1992 journal article, the late journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard offered this explanation:

“[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.”

In a 2009 book on culture, my colleague Tyler Cowen also noted how, “Parents, who are entrusted with human lives of their own making, bring their dearest feelings, years of time, and many thousands of dollars to their childrearing efforts.” Unsurprisingly, therefore, “they will react with extreme vigor against forces that counteract such an important part of their life program.” This explains why “the very same individuals tend to adopt cultural optimism when they are young, and cultural pessimism once they have children,” Cowen says.

Building on Blanchard and Cowen’s observation, I have explained how the most simple explanation for this phenomenon is that many parents and cultural critics have passed through their “adventure window.” The willingness of humans to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture—our “adventure window”—fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually settle in our ways. As the English satirist Douglas Adams once humorously noted: “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

There is no doubt social media can create or exacerbate certain social pathologies among youth. But pro-censorship conservatives wants to take the easy way out with a Big Government media ban for the ages.

Ultimately, it’s a solution that will not be effective. Raising children and mentoring youth is certainly the hardest task we face as adults because simple solutions rarely exist to complex human challenges–and the issues kids face are often particularly hard for many parents and adults to grapple with because we often fail to fully understand both the unique issues each generation might face, and we definitely fail to fully grasp the nature of each new medium that youth embrace.  Simplistic solution–even proposals for outright bans–will not work or solve serious problems.

An outright government ban on online platforms or digital devices is likely never going to happen due to First Amendment constraints, but even ignoring the jurisprudential barriers, bans won’t work for a reason that these conservatives never bother considering: Many parents will help their kids get access to those technologies and to evade restrictions on their use. Countless parents already do so in violation of COPPA rules, and not just because they worry that their kid won’t have access to what some other kids have. Rather, many parents (like me) both wanted to make sure I could more easily communicate with them, and also ensure that they could enjoy those technologies and use them to explore the world.

These conservatives might think some parents like me are monsters for allowing my (now grown) children to get on social media when they were teens. I wasn’t blind to the challenges, but recognized that sticking one’s head in the ground or hoping for divine intervention from the Nanny State was impractical and unwise. The hardest conversations I ever had with my kids were about the ugliness they sometimes experienced online, but those conversations were also countered by the many joys that I knew online interactions brought them. Shall I tell you about everything my son learned online before 13 about building model rockets or soapbox derby cars? Or the countless sites my daughter visited gathering ideas for her arts and crafts projects when, before the age of 13, she started hand-painting and selling jean jackets (eventually prompting her to pursue an art school degree)? Again, as I noted in my National Review response, Rosen’s prohibitionist proposal would deny teens these experiences and the countless other routine and entirely beneficial interactions that they have with their peers online every day.

There is simply no substitute for talking to your kids in the most open, understanding, and loving fashion possible. My #1 priority with my own children was not foreclosing all the new digital media platforms and devices at their disposal. That was going to be almost impossible. Other approaches are needed.

Yes, of course, the world can be an ugly place. I mean, have you ever watched the nightly news on television? It’s damn ugly. Shouldn’t we block youth access to it when scenes of war and violence are shown? Newspapers are full of ugliness, too. Should a kid be allowed to see the front page of the paper when it discusses or shows the aftermath of school shootings, acts of terrorism, or even just natural disasters? I could go on, but you get the point. And you could try to claim that somehow today’s social media environment is significantly worse for kids than the mass media of old, but you cannot prove it.

Of course you’ll have anecdotes, and many of them will again point to complex social pathologies. But I have entire shelves full of books on my office wall that made similar claims about the effects of books, the telephone, radio and television, comics, cable TV, every musical medium ever, video games, and advertising efforts across all these mediums. Hundreds upon hundreds of studies were done over the past half century about the effects of depictions of violence in movies, television, and video games. And endless court battles ensued.

In the end, nothing came out of it because the literature was inconclusive and frequently contradictory. After many years of panicking about youth and media violence, in 2020, the American Psychological Association issued a new statement slowly reversing course on misguided past statements about video games and acts of real-world violence. The APA’s old statement said that evidence “confirms [the] link between playing violent video games and aggression.”  But the APA has come around and now says that, “there is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.” More specifically, the APA now says: “Violence is a complex social problem that likely stems from many factors that warrant attention from researchers, policy makers and the public. Attributing violence to violent video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors.”

This is exactly what we should expect to find true for youth and social media. Most of the serious scholars in the field already note studies and findings about youth and social media must be carefully evaluated and that many other factors need to be considered whenever evaluating claims about complex social phenomenon.

While Rosen belittles media literacy and other educational and empowerment-based solutions to online problems, those approaches continue to represent the best first-order response when compared to the repressive regulatory regime she would impose on society.

Finally, I want to just reiterate what I said in my brief  National Review response about the enormous challenges associated with mass criminalization or speech platforms. Rosen seems to image that all the costs and controversies will lie on the supply-side of social media. Just call for a ban and then magically all kids disappear from social media and the big evil tech capitalists eat all the costs and hassles. Nonsense. It’s the demand-side of criminalization efforts where the most serious costs lie. What do you really think kids are going to do if Uncle Sam suddenly does ban everyone under 18 from going on a “social media site,” whatever that very broad term entails? This will become another sad chapter in the history of Big Government prohibitionist efforts that fail miserably, but not before declaring mass groups of people criminals–this time including everyone under 18–and then trying to throw the book at them when they seek to avoid those repressive controls. There are better ways to address these problems than with such extremist proposals.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer on Media & Content Regulation :

• “Should All Kids Under 18 Be Banned from Social Media?”
• “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”
• “The APA’s Welcome New Statement on Video Game Violence“
• “Video Games and Moral Panic“
• Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods, 4th Edition.
• “Technopanics and the Great Social Networking Scare“
• “More on Monkey See-Monkey Do Theories about Media Violence & Real-World Crime“
• “Video Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis.”)
• “The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues“
• “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment“
• “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer“
• “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“
• “Conservatives & Common Carriage: Contradictions & Challenges“
• “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“
• “A Good Time to Re-Read Reagan’s Fairness Doctrine Veto“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“
• “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“
• “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“
• “The Not-So-SMART Act“
• “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

• “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age,” Catholic University Law School, 15 CommLaw Conspectus (Summer 2007): 431-482.
• Testimony at FCC’s Hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era”, March 3, 2010.
• “FCC v. Fox and the Future of the First Amendment in the Information Age,”

Does anyone remember Blockbuster and Hollywood Video? I assume most of you do, but wow, doesn’t it seem like forever ago when we actually had to drive to stores to get movies to watch at home? What a drag that was!

Yet, just 15 years ago, that was the norm and those two firms were the titans of video distribution, so much so that federal regulators at the Federal Trade Commission looked to stop their hegemony through antitrust intervention. But then those firms and whatever “market power” they possessed quickly evaporated as a wave of Schumpeterian creative destruction swept through video distribution markets. Both those firms and antitrust regulators had completely failed to anticipate the tsunami of technological and marketplace changes about to hit in the form of alternative online video distribution platforms as well as the rise of smartphones and robust nationwide mobile networks.

Today, this serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when regulatory hubris triumphs over policy humility, as Trace Mitchell and I explain in this new essay for  National Review Online entitled, “The Crystal Ball of Antitrust Regulators Is Cracked.” As we note:

There is no discernable end point to the process of entrepreneurial-driven change. In fact, it seems to be proliferating rapidly. To survive, even the most successful companies must be willing to quickly dispense with yesterday’s successful business plans, lest they be steamrolled by the relentless pace of technological change and ever-shifting consumer demands. It is easy to understand why some people find it hard to imagine a time when Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google won’t be quite as dominant as they are today. But it was equally challenging 20 years ago to imagine that those same companies could disrupt the giants of that era.

Hopefully today’s policymakers will have a little more patience and trust competition and continued technological innovation to bring us still more wonderful video choices.

[OC] Blockbuster Video US store locations between 1986 and 2019 from r/dataisbeautiful

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” Thus did Ronald Reagan capture the essence of big government. The two biggest challenges facing defenders of free markets in technology policy lie in Reagan’s second point:

• Telling the “Good News Story” about how “it” (human ingenuity—what the great economist Julian Simon called our “Ultimate Resource”) keeps “moving” (by inventing new hardware, software, services, etc.)
• Holding the line against efforts to extend the regulatory regimes of the past over new technologies, and chipping away at those regimes as best we can

So one might think that believers in limited government would celebrate a company like Google as a great American success story: A university research program launched by two smart kids (one of whom fled Communist oppression) that grew from a garage start-up into a global tech titan whose wide-ranging innovations are revolutionizing more and more of the economy. Surely free marketeers would rally to the defense of such a company when, say, the New York Times—that if-it-moves-regulate-it bastion—calls for bringing “into the regulatory fold,” right?

Unfortunately, all too many free marketeers seem willing to hang Google out to dry, or at least stay silent because they resent the pro-regulatory policy positions taken by the company or the political leanings of its employees and leadership. The company has hardly been a champion of digital capitalism in Washington, allying itself with a number tax/regulate/subsidize groups, pushing for net neutrality regulation, and using antitrust as a sword against its rivals (some of whom seem willing to return the favor). But the principles at stake are too important for free marketeers to gloat, as Adam Thierer argued in an op/ed for National Review Online earlier this week: Government vs. Google: Why Free Marketeers Should Rally Against “Search Neutrality.”

• First Amendment Protection of Search Algorithms as Editorial Discretion – by Berin Szoka
• Net Neutrality, Slippery Slopes & High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction – by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
• The Day Real Internet Freedom Died – by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
• Odlyzko on Net Neutrality, Price Discrimination, PrivacyFail, Search & Cloud Neutrality – by Berin Szoka
• Google Voice & the Slippery Slope of Net Neutrality Regulation – by Adam Thierer
• Is the FCC Becoming the Federal Cloud Commission? – by Adam Thierer
• My Net Neutrality Debate with Public Knowledge – by Berin Szoka

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 a Great War is one of my all-time favorite novels.  I cannot in strong enough words encourage you to read that book; it is profoundly moving. (I almost named my son after the lead character in the book!)

Thus, I was quite excited when I learned that Helprin had penned a defense of copyright and I jumped at the chance to review it when the folks at National Review asked me to do so.  Alas, as you will see in my review, I was terribly disappointed.  I wish Helprin would have stuck with the very reasonable tone he adopted in this excellent podcast interview he did recently with John J. Miller of National Review Online. Unfortunately, he went a different direction in the book, as I make clear in my review:

National Review July 20, 2009

“Man, Machine, and Copyright” a review of Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, by Mark Helprin by Adam Thierer

It would be difficult to think of anyone more ideally suited to pen a passionate defense of copyright law than novelist Mark Helprin.  Helprin has written several of the finest works of modern literature, including his masterpiece, A Soldier of the Great War, a narrative of transcendent beauty. In Digital Barbarism, Helprin sets out to use his formidable gift for the written word to repel the “cyber mob” that has attacked copyright law and called for its curtailment, or even abolition.

Unfortunately, while Helprin occasionally rises to great heights in his defense of copyright, he too often sinks to lamentable lows — by resorting to the same unbecoming rhetorical tactics used by the mob he seeks to condemn. Indeed, his book is filled with gratuitous vitriol and neo-Luddite ramblings about the Internet and Information Age that severely detract from his defense of copyright. This is a shame, because, in places, Digital Barbarism makes a fine case against those critics who wrongly view copyright as an impediment to the creation and diffusion of content. “The availability of information is not and will not be restrained by the copyright system any more than it is or will be restrained by the delivery systems that make it possible,” Helprin argues. Why, he asks, “must ‘content’ be free” when everything else — access to the Internet, digital devices, etc. — costs good money? He notes that the movement that advocates “free,” universal access to all copyrighted material in the name of “openness” and “the public good” would, ironically, “destroy the dream it advocates”:

By insistence upon unhindered access without regard for rights and incentives that have been carefully balanced over centuries, the hurried new order will diminish the substance over which it demands sovereignty. It will have its access, but, as time passes, to less and less, and eventually perhaps to almost nothing, the means having grossly overpowered the ends. The past may be brilliantly cataloged and made accessible as never before, but at the cost of making the culture of the present relatively barren. Though it may never be entirely extinguished, it can be made as eerily quiet as if without the beat of a single heart.

The power of Helprin’s defense of copyright is that it is grounded in both this sort of utilitarian rationale and a Lockean, natural-rights-based conception of man’s moral right to the fruit of his mental labor. But there are many thorny issues Helprin fails to address in setting forth his dual defense of copyright.

To begin with, things just aren’t as black-and-white as he makes them out to be. There’s a certain inherent messiness to “intellectual property,” at least when compared with tangible property. As an abstract concept, it’s easy enough to defend. In practice, however, it often proves exceedingly challenging to delimit and enforce, since intangible creations cannot be enclosed the same way our back yards can.

This does not mean, however, that the opposite approach — a collectivized “commons” for intellectual creations — is more sensible. That intangible property is harder to enclose and protect doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t seek to do so. “Copyright is important because it is one of the guarantors of the rights of authorship,” Helprin argues, “and the rights of authorship are important because without them the individual voice would be subsumed in an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass.”

American copyright law has generally cast this right in utilitarian terms, ever since the Founders gave Congress the power under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” But how much “limited time” is enough time to incentivize creativity and invention? Under the first Copyright Act, enacted by Congress in 1790, the term of protection was just 14 years plus a right to renew for an additional 14 if the author was still alive.

There are many legitimately difficult questions about the enforceability of copyright in an age of ubiquitous digital connectivity and instantaneous information flows. I came to appreciate these challenges several years ago after transferring my entire 30-year CD collection to a portable music player that was smaller than a box of cards. How can copyright coexist with the giant copying machine represented by the combination of personal computers, digital devices, and the Internet? What sorts of restrictions on devices and networks are required to ensure that we continue to reward intellectual creativity without destroying the forms of technological innovation? How should copyright law define “fair use” in a culture that increasingly enables collaboration and encourages “remixing”? Will we need to create new “compulsory licensing” schemes — already in place for radio and television — to ensure that creators are compensated through mandatory fees embedded in digital devices or our monthly broadband bills?

These are challenging questions that deserve a fair hearing. But Helprin rarely bothers with these details because he’s too busy trading jabs with “the mob.” Unfortunately, his manifesto goes off the rails as his defense of copyright quickly morphs into an indictment of the Internet and all things digital.

At times, Helprin seems to be channeling the ghost of the late social critic Neil Postman, who, in his 1992 anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, heaped contempt upon the unfolding Information Age. Recently, Internet critics such as Lee Siegel (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob) and Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture) have continued this tradition of deep techno-skepticism. With Digital Barbarism, Helprin joins this cause, arguing that we are witnessing “the decline of culture,” the “mechanization of the soul,” our “intellectual and spiritual destruction,” and the rise of a movement of “wacked-out muppets led by little professors in glasses” that “threatens in a decade or two to dissolve the accomplishments of millennia, reordering the ways in which we think, write, and communicate.”

And Helprin is just getting started. While he claims that he is “not decrying the digital revolution per se,” it often sounds that way. He speaks repeatedly about the “surrender” of human nature to “the machine revolution” and the corresponding need to “control the machine.”

Much of Helprin’s Internet ire seems to originate with the anonymous “blogging-ants” who have attacked his earlier essays in defense of copyright-term extension. Digital Barbarism becomes his chance for payback. “It would be one thing if [the digital] revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels,” Helprin says, “but it doesn’t. . . . It produces mouth-breathing morons in backward baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom seek daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world won’t end . . . beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch,” and so on.

Unfortunately for Helprin, would-be rappers, basement-dwelling geeks, enviro-hippies, and NASCAR fans all predate the rise of the Internet, so one wonders if he has fingered the right culprit for civilization’s supposed decline. The fundamental problem with Digital Barbarism is that the cultural decay Helprin laments cannot be so easily tied to the battle over copyright. Indeed, most of what Helprin condemns in modern culture has come about during a time when copyright’s protections — at least as defined by law — have been expanded considerably in both length of term and breadth of coverage.

Moreover, he is simply too quick to proclaim the decline of modern civilization by looking only to the baser elements of the blogosphere. The Internet is a cultural and intellectual bazaar where one can find both the best and the worst of humanity on display at any given moment. True, “brutishness and barbarism” can be found on many cyber-corners, but not all of its corners. And, contrary to Helprin’s assertion that blogging “begins the mad race to the bottom,” one could just as easily cite countless instances of the healthy, unprecedented conversations that blogs have enabled about a diverse array of topics. Finally, even if one concedes, for the sake of argument, that blogging produces more cultural trash than treasure, would greatly enhanced copyright protection really turn things around?

There are strong moral and utilitarian arguments for protecting copyright and, during his calmer moments, Helprin articulates some of them quite effectively. He is surely right that “theft is ugly,” and that far too many people (especially in academia) are turning a blind eye to the injustices of the widespread copyright infringement taking place online today. There’s a lot of good sense buried underneath the angry rhetoric of this book; it’s regrettable — and surprising — that someone of Mark Helprin’s literary prowess didn’t make a better effort to persuade his readers.

Additional Reading about Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto:

• Mark Helprin’s home page, his Claremont Institute page, and his Wikipedia entry
• Helprin’s New York Times editorial that prompted a backlash and led him to write the book
• Helprin podcast interview with National Review Online
• Russ Roberts interviews Helprin for the Econ Talk podcast
• Lawrence Lessig’s written response at the Huffington Post and an NPR interview with Lessig about the book
• Helprin’s recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “Copyright Critics Rationalize Theft,” which is condensed from the book
• the Amazon page and HarperCollins page for the Digital Barbarism
• a review by Jeremy Philips, and executive with News Corp, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal
• a review by Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal (+ lots of good comments)
• a review by Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance (Part 1, Part 2)
• a review by Jonathan Bailey that appeared on the Plagiarism Today blog
• a review by Nate Anderson of Ars Technica

Unfortunately, as I predicted would be the case in my National Review editorial earlier this morning, today’s hearing on video games in the Senate Judiciary Committee turned out to be quite a one-sided show trial.

Senator Sam Brownback called the hearing to blast the game industry for what he called “graphic,” “horrific,” and even “barbaric” level of violence we supposedly see in games today. Violent video games, he argued, are becoming “simulators” that train kids to behave violently and even kill cops.

And his proof? As I suspected would be the case (and, again, predicted in my editorial) it largely came down to two key games: “Grand Theft Auto” and “25 to Life.” Sen. Brownback decided to show a few clips from these games and one other title (“Postal”) to supposedly illustrate just how violent games are today. Now make no doubt about it, these games do contain some truly sickening, despicable acts of simulated violence. I don’t know why a game developer feels compelled to show thugs beating prostitutes with a baseball bat, or a criminal shooting cops with a sniper rifle, or someone torching a dead corpse and then urinating on it to put out the fire. It’s all very sick and it’s quite sad that someone is squandering their creative talents on the depiction of such disgusting, disrespectful acts of violence.

But let’s get back to the key point and ask a question that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE EVEN BOTHERED DISCUSSING AT THE HEARING. Namely: Are these games indicative of all video games out there today?

Answer: Not by a long shot. In reality, games like “Grand Theft Auto” and “25 to Life” are not representative of what most kids are playing.

As I showed in my recent paper on “Fact and Fiction in the Debate over Video Game Regulation,” of all the games that Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB)–the self-regulatory ratings board for the gaming industry–reviewed in 2005, less than 13 percent were rated “Mature” (M) or “Adults Only” (AO), the categories that contain the sort of violence critics are concerned about. In fact, less than 1 percent were rated Adults Only. Thus, around 86 percent of all games sold in 2004 were rated either “Early Childhood” (EC), “Everyone” (E), “Everyone 10 and older” (E10+), or “Teen” (T). Moreover, in my study I also compiled the ratings for all of the Top-20 video and computer games between 2001-2005 and found that over 80 percent of the most popular games were rated either “E” or “T.” If one removes from the count the various “Grand Theft Auto” and “Halo” titles (there have been multiple best-selling versions of each game), the percentage of “M” rated games drops even further. So, it’s not the case that all games are as “barbaric” as the ones Sen. Brownback singled out.

Of course, the video game industry didn’t get a chance to make this point at the hearing since no one from the industry was invited to sit on either panel. Patricia Vance, President of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board was there, but she doesn’t represent the industry. She just runs the voluntary organization that rates all the games.

Brownback grilled Ms. Vance and tried to make her atone for the sins of a few developers out there that make the games like “25 to Life.” Of course, as she noted in response, the ESRB has no power to keep such games off the market, it just rates those games and gives parents to information they need to make informed judgments about the games they allow in their homes.

Brownback and a few others on the two panels, which mostly consisted of psychologists, also questioned whether the industry could even be trusted to rate its own games. That led to suggestions of a federal ratings system. Alternatively, if the private ratings system is retained, Brownback asked some of the panelists what they thought about his idea to require that before new “M”-rated games could be released, they should be reviewed by an independent panel of experts or psychologists to gauge what impact it might have on players. A couple of people muttered their approval of such a proposal. Luckily, however, one brave soul, Dr. Dmitri Williams of the Univ. of Illinois, pointed out that psychologists don’t exactly crank out their work in a matter or minutes. Indeed, it takes many months, even years, to conduct a serious study on the impact of media on individuals. Thus, Brownback’s idea would likely bring game releases to a standstill. Moreover, such a proposal, if imposed by law, would likely represent an impermissible form of prior restraint and found unconstitutional. But hey, never mind that little thing called the First Amendment!

Regarding those psychologists on the panel… they couldn’t come to any definitive conclusion regarding the impact of games on children’s behavior. For example, Dr. Elizabeth Carll of the American Psychological Association and Dr. David Bickham of the Harvard Medical School both said that games “may” or “might” cause feelings of aggression, but they also pointed out that there really hasn’t been substantial long-term evidence to confirm that belief. Despite this, both Carll and Bickman argued that government should just go ahead and regulate anyway!

But Dr. Williams of the Univ. of Illinois, who has authored several studies on these issues, pointed to the many problems with current research, including that fact that there are no long-term, longitudinal studies and that the current short-term experiments are typically conducted in very unnatural laboratory settings. (Those settings also are devoid of the sort of group or community play that increasingly typifies gaming). Moreover, many of these studies do not account for other “environmental” factors that might have a bearing on actual aggression, such as broken homes, parental abuse, drugs, bad neighborhoods, or medical or mental conditions.

More specifically, Dr. Williams brought up what I think is the most important issue related to all “media effects” research. That is, does arousal equal aggression? Just because a particular study reveals that watching simulated violence in a movie, TV show or video game leads to feelings of “arousal” (heightened brain or heart waves, punching a Bobo doll, etc.), does that mean that actual aggression or violence will follow out in a real-world environment? You would think an important question like that would get a lot more attention in the media effects literature or in the public debate over regulating media. But it doesn’t. I actually read a lot of these studies and some of them raise this issue, but many just continue to rely on some sort of proxy as an indication of real-world aggression. But humans can get “aroused” from many things and not turn into violent monsters. Reading a riveting book, watching a scary movie, watching a bruising boxing match, listening to a loud rock concert… those are just a few things that millions of people have been doing for the past few decades without turning around and harming others afterwards. Did the media in question “arouse” them? You bet. Your heart and head can really get pumping when you enjoy powerful media images or sounds. But it doesn’t follow that you become aggressive thug just because you get aroused by those media.

Indeed, if it was that case that such a clear link existed, it should be showing up in the numbers. Cultural and social indicators, that is. But it’s not. As I also pointed out in my recent paper, while the laboratory studies have been largely inconclusive, it is possible to at least analyze the claim that there is a correlation between general exposure to video games and declining cultural indicators. Data is readily available on many cultural indicators of concern and can be plotted against increasing childhood exposure to media and video games. And all those numbers–juvenile violence, kids carrying weapons in schools, high school drop-out rates, teen pregnancy, etc–are all going down. In particular, according to the FBI, aggregate violent crime by juveniles fell 43 percent from 1995-2004. This evidence was also completely ignored at today’s hearing.

So, the picture politicians are painting about video games is being based on half-truths, myths, and misperceptions. I guess I should have expected as much going into today’s Senate hearing. But I keep hoping that policymakers will be willing to listen to reason and the facts in debates about media policy. Silly me. When will I ever learn?