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.

Isolation and inattention panics are some of the most common “fear cycles” that we have seen repeatedly play out through the ages. Indeed, sociologist Frank Furedi reminds us that panics over isolation, distraction, or inattention have been quite common. Consistent with that xkcd comic, Furedi has documented how “inattention has served as a sublimated focus for apprehensions about moral authority” going back to at least the early 1700s and continuing on through the next two centuries. During those years, he notes:

Inattention was increasingly perceived as an obstacle to the socialisation of young people. Countering the habit of inattention among children and young people became the central concern of pedagogy in the 18th century […]  During the 19th century, the state of inattention became thoroughly moralised. Inattentiveness was perceived as a threat to industrial progress, scientific advance and prosperity.

Today, however, the panic over inattention has ramped up, Furedi argues:

Unlike in the 18th century when it was perceived as abnormal, today inattention is often presented as the normal state. The current era is frequently characterised as the Age of Distraction, and inattention is no longer depicted as a condition that afflicts a few. Nowadays, the erosion of humanity’s capacity for attention is portrayed as an existential problem, linked with the allegedly corrosive effects of digitally driven streams of information relentlessly flowing our way.

While I generally agree these panics are overblown, one must also admit that there is some degree of truth to  all of them in the sense that each new technology presents us with some added level of potential distraction. And today we have more of those potential distractions than ever before. So, something’s gotta give, right?

“What information consumes is rather obvious,” Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon remarked in 1971: “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Almost a half century later, we are confronted with a “wealth of information” that Simon could not have imagined, and that’s what has many critics worried about the potentially socially-destructive consequences of new technologies.

But social critics who write about this supposed “poverty of attention” problem have taken matters to the extreme and concocted some entertaining rhetorical ploys in an attempt to one-up each other on the panic meter. In a 2005 book, I discussed dozens of colorful book and article titles and terms like: “information overload;” “cognitive overload;” “information anxiety;” “information fatigue syndrome;” “information paralysis;” “techno-stress;” “information pollution;” “data smog;” and even “data asphyxiation.”

And that was all pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter! A dozen years later, this isolation-is-killing-us theme is becoming even more prevalent in books and articles. There are far to many books of this ilk to list here, but a quick sampling of the most popular ones would include: Nick Carr ( The Shallows), Franklin Foer (World Without Mind), Maggie Jackson (Distracted), Sherry Turkle (Alone Together), Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble), John Freeman (The Tyranny of E-Mail), and Cass Sunstein (Republic.com), among many others. I have an entire bookshelf in my office filled with nothing but books of this variety, all penned over just the past 20 years.

Perhaps the sheer volume of panicky tracts suggests that there must be something to these fears. Let’s be clear: isolation, distraction, or inattention  are problems. But to some extent, these are problems that have always been with us and are not going away any time soon.

Social critics and cranky intellectuals love to complain about new technologies, and that’s never going to end. The best of that criticism will incorporate practical strategies for living a better life and suggest steps for how we all can find a better balance with the technologies that dominate our lives–today, tomorrow, and on into the future.

Sadly, most critics take a different approach which implicitly suggests we have somehow departed a golden age of living and that only a dystopian hellscape awaits us from here on out (if we’re not already living in it). It’s utter poppycock. As I’ve written before, pastoral myths and public square fantasies about some supposedly glorious but no-lost “good old days” are a lot of fun right up until you realize that the old days were, in fact, eras of abject misery. By almost every meaningful metric, we are better today than we were in the past, and that is probably just as true for things that we don’t have metrics for, including “attentiveness” or “distractability.”

We’d all like to think that people–especially kids–were somehow more attentive, more social, and more civil in the past than they are in today’s seemingly more cluttered, cacophonous, hurly-burly modern era. But there is absolutely no concrete evidence suggesting that is true and, as Furedi shows, there exists plenty of anecdotal evidence that when it comes to inattention, things really haven’t changed that much at all. We can and should strive to do better and find constructive solutions to problems such as these, but we should not go overboard with rhetorical threat inflation about the nature or severity of this problem. Nor should we pursue impractical or highly destructive solutions that would undermine the many other benefits associated with our new technological capabilities.

Ironically, at their very worst, isolation or inattention panics accomplish the exact opposite of what some social critics suggest that they desire. The critics often claim that they are just looking out for the next generation and trying to chart a better path for them. In reality, however, those critics are often just engaging in the same sort of fear-mongering and youth-shaming that countless other generations have before with their “KIDS THESE DAYS!” complaints. It’s always easy for intellectuals to tap into the worst fears of parents and policymakers by suggesting that the younger generation has lost the ability to reason or communicate effectively. And yet, each generation somehow figures out how to muddle through. We are an imperfect species, but we are also a highly resilient one.

Of course, that won’t stop an entirely new generation of critics from panicking about whatever future technology is apparently distracting the next generation to death. Fear sells and panics get attention. The calmer truths that history teaches us take longer to appreciate.

Additional Reading:

• Is It “Techno-Chauvinist” & “Anti-Humanist” to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology? (9/18/18)
• How to Sell a Book about Tech Policy: Turn the Technopanic Dial Up to 11 (1/2/18)
• What a 1911 Silent Movie Tells Us about the Technopanic Mentality (6/21/17)
• Regarding the Use of Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Policy Debates (10/29/14)
• Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change (6/14/14)
• The Problem with “Pessimism Porn” (5/23/14)
• BOOK: “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom”
• What Does It Mean to “Have a Conversation” about a New Technology? (5/23/13)
• paper: Technopanics, Threat Inflation & an Info-Tech Precautionary Principle (2/28/12)
• Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short? (Forbes, 1/8/12)
• On Nostalgia (12/28/11)

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”:

I will now say a few words about new global threats emerging from the misuse of science and technology, and the power of globalization. Information and communication technologies, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and synthetic biology will bring profound changes to our everyday lives and benefits to millions of people. However, their potential for misuse could also bring destruction. The nexus between these emerging technologies and WMD needs close examination and action. As a starting point, the international community must step up to expand common ground for the peaceful use of cyberspace and, particularly, the intersection between cyberspace and critical infrastructure.  People now live a significant portion of their lives online. They must be protected from online attacks, just as effectively as they are protected from physical attacks. Disarmament and non-proliferation instruments are only as successful as Member States’ capacity to implement them.

And the Secretary-General concluded by calling on “all Member States to re-commit themselves and to take action. The stakes are simply too high to ignore.”

The Secretary-General’s inclusion of all these emerging technologies in a speech about WMDs and the dangers of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons raises an interesting question: Are all these things actually equivalent? Does a danger exist from the continued evolution of ICTs, AI, 3D printing, and synthetic biology that is equal to the very serious threat posed by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons?

On one hand, it is tempting to say, Yes! If nothing else, most of us have seen more than enough techno-dystopian Hollywood plots through the years to understand the hypothetical dangers that some of these technologies pose. But even if (like me) you dismiss most of the movie plots as far-fetched Chicken Little-ism meant to drum up big box office, plenty of serious scholars out there have sketched out more credible pictures of the threat some of these new technologies might pose to humanity. Information platforms can be hacked and our personal data or security compromised. 3D printers can be used to create cheap, undetectable firearms. Robotics and autonomous systems can be programmed to kill. Synthetic biology might help create genetically-modified super-soldiers. And so on.

These are serious questions with profound ramifications and I discussed them at much greater length in my lengthy review of Wendell Wallach’s important book, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping beyond Our Control. Like many other books and essays on these technologies, Wallach champions “the need for more upstream governance” as in “more control over the way that potentially harmful technologies are developed or introduced into the larger society. Upstream management is certainly better than introducing regulations downstream, after a technology is deeply entrenched or something major has already gone wrong,” he suggests. “Yet, even when we can access risks, there remain difficulties in recognizing when or determining how much control should be introduced. When does being precautionary make sense, and when is precaution an over-reaction to the risks?”

Indeed, that is the right question, and quite a profound one. The problem associated with all such “upstream governance” and preemptive controls on emerging technologies is determining how to avoid hypothetical future risks without destroying the potential for these same technologies to be used in life-enriching and even life-saving ways.

Solutions are illusive and involve myriad trade-offs. More generally, it’s not even clear that they would be workable. That is especially true when you expand the scale of governance to include the entire planet. It seems unlikely, for example, that a hypothetical UN-led Synthetic Biology Non-Proliferation Treaty, 3D-Printed Weapons Convention, or Agreement on the Peaceful Use of Cyberspace are going to be workable solutions in a world where these technologies are so radically decentralized and proliferating so rapidly. At least with some of the older technologies, the underlying materials were somewhat harder to obtain, manufacture, weaponize, and then distribute/use. But the same is not true of many of these newer technologies. It’s a heck of lot easier to get access to a computer and 3D printer than uranium and enrichment facilities, for example.

Moreover, when we discuss the risks associated with emerging technologies compared to past technologies, there needs to be some sort of weighing of the actual probability of serious harm coming about. In the expanded Second Edition of my Permissionless Innovation book, I tried to offer a rough framework for when formal precautionary regulation (i.e., operational restrictions, licensing requirements, research limitations, or even formal bans) might be necessary. In a section of Chapter 3 of my book entitled, “When Does Precaution Make Sense?” I argued that:

Generally speaking, permissionless innovation should remain the norm in the vast majority of cases, but there will be some scenarios where the threat of tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic harm associated with new innovations could require at least a light version of the precautionary principle to be applied.  In these cases, we might be better suited to think about when an “anti-catastrophe principle” is needed, which narrows the scope of the precautionary principle and focuses it more appropriately on the most unambiguously worst-case scenarios that meet those criteria.

“But most [emerging technology] cases don’t fall into this category,” I concluded. It is simply not the case that most emerging technologies pose the same sort of tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, and highly probably risk that traditional “weapons of mass destruction” do.

And that gets at my problem with that recent address by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. By so casually moving from a heated discussion of traditional WMDs into a brief discussion about the potential risks associated with ICTs, AI, 3D printing and synthetic biology, I really worry about the sort of moral equivalence that some might read into this speech. Again, these things, and the threats they pose, are simply not the same. Yet, when the UN Secretary-General sandwiches these technologies in between impassioned opening and closing statements about the need “to take action” because “the stakes are simply too high to ignore,” it seems to suggest he is prepared to speak of them all in the same breath as traditional “weapons of mass destruction” and suggest similar global control efforts are needed. I do not believe that is sensible.

Does this mean we just throw our hands up in the air and give up any inquiry into the matter? Of course not. As I noted in my review of Wallach’s book, some very sensible “soft law” approaches exist that are worth pursuing. Soft law approaches can include a wide variety of efforts to “bake a dose of precautionary directly into the innovation process through a wide variety of informal governance/oversight mechanisms,” as I noted in my review of Wallach’s book. “By embedding shared values in the very design of new tools and techniques, engineers improve the prospect of a positive outcome,” Wallach says in his book.

Many soft law or informal governance systems already exist in the forms of  so-called “multistakeholder governance” systems, informal industry codes of conduct, best practices, and other coordinating mechanisms. But these solutions would likely fall short of addressing some extreme scenarios that many people are worried about. Toward that end, when the case can be made that a particular application of a new general purpose technology will result in tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, and highly probably dangers, then perhaps some international action should be considered. For example, a case can be made that governments (and perhaps even the UN) should do more to preemptively curb the most nefarious uses of robotics. There’s already a major effort underway called the “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots” that seeks a multinational treaty to stop deadly uses of robotics. Again, I’m not sure how enforcement will work, but I think it’s worth investigating how some of the uses of “killer robots” might be limited through international accords and actions. Moreover, I could imagine an extension of existing the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention framework to cover some synthetic biology applications that involve extreme forms of human modification.

That being said, policymakers and international figures of importance like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon should be extremely cautious about the language they use to describe new classes of technologies lest they cast too wide a net with calls for controlling “weapons of mass destruction” that may be nothing of the sort.

Additional Reading 

• “Wendell Wallach on the Challenge of Engineering Better Technology Ethics“
• “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy“
• “What Does It Mean to “Have a Conversation” about a New Technology?”
• “Making Sure the “Trolley Problem” Doesn’t Derail Life-Saving Innovation”
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom

“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)

Opposition to Change: It’s All in Your Head

Juma documents, for example, how “status quo bias,” loss aversion, and other psychological tendencies tend to encourage resistance to technological change. [Note: I discussed these and other “root-cause” explanations of opposition to technological change in Chapter 2 of my book, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, as well as in my 2012 law review article on “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.”]  Juma notes, for example, that “society is most likely to oppose a new technology if it perceives that the risks are likely to occur in the short run and the benefits will only accrue in the long run.” (p. 5) Moreover, “much of the concern is driven by perception of loss, not necessarily by concrete evidence of loss.” (p. 11)

Juma’s approach to innovation policy studies is strongly influenced by the path-breaking work of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who long ago documented how entrepreneurial activity and the “perennial gales of creative destruction” were the prime forces that spurred innovation and propelled society forward. But Schumpeter was also one of the first scholars to realize that psychological fears about such turbulent change was what ultimately lead to much of the short-term opposition to new technologies that, in due time, we eventually come to see as life-enriching or even life-essential innovations.  Juma uses Schumpeter’s insight as the launching point for his exploration and he successfully verifies it using meticulously-detailed case studies.

Case Study-Driven Analysis

My favorite case study in the book discusses how the dairy industry fought the creation and spread of margarine (excuse the pun!). I had no idea how ugly that situation got, but Juma provides all the gory details in what I consider one of the very best crony capitalist case studies ever penned.

In particular, in a subsection of that chapter entitled “The Laws against Margarine,” he provides a litany of examples of how effective the dairy industry was in convincing lawmakers to enact ridiculous anti-consumer regulations to stop margarine, even though the product offered the public a much-needed, and much more affordable, substitute for traditional butter. At one point, the daily industry successfully lobbied five states to adopt rules mandating that any imitation butter product had to be dyed pink! Other states enacted labelling laws that required butter substitutes to come in ominous-looking black packaging. Again, all this was done at the request of the incumbent dairy industry and the National Dairy Council, which would resort to almost any sort of deceptive tactic to keep a cheaper competing product out of the hands of consumers.

And so it goes in chapter after chapter of Juma’s book. The amount of detail in each of these unique case studies is absolutely stunning, but they nonetheless remain highly readable accounts of sectoral protectionism, special interest rent-seeking, and regulatory capture. In this way, Juma is plowing some familiar ground already covered by other economic historians and political scientists, such as Joel Mokyr and Mancur Olson, both of whom are mentioned in the book, as well as a long line of public choice scholars who are, somewhat surprisingly, not discussed in the text. Nonetheless, Juma’s approach is still fresh, unique, and highly informative. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many distinct and highly detailed case studies assembled in one place by a single scholar.  What Juma has done here is truly impressive.

Related Innovation Policy Paradigms

Beyond Schumpeter’s clear influence, Juma’s approach to studying innovation policy also shares a great deal in common with two other unmentioned innovation policy scholars, Virginia Postrel and Robert D. Atkinson.

Postrel’s 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, contrasted the conflicting worldviews of “dynamism” and “stasis” and showed how the tensions between these two visions would affect the course of human affairs. She made the case for embracing dynamism — “a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition” — over the “regulated, engineered world” of the stasis mentality. Similarly, in his 2004 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy, Atkinson documented how “American history is rife with resistance to change,” and in recounting some of the heated battles over previous technological revolutions he showed how two camps were always evident: “preservationists” and “modernizers.”

When Juma repeatedly recounts the fight between “innovation and incumbency” in his case studies, he is essentially describing the same paradigmatic divide that Postrel and Atkinson highlight in their works when they discuss “dynamist” vs. “stasis” tensions and the “modernizers” vs. “preservationists” battles that we have seen throughout history. [Note: In my 2014 essay on, “Thinking about Innovation Policy Debates: 4 Related Paradigms,” I discussed Postrel and Atkinson’s books and other approaches to understanding tech policy divisions and then related them to the paradigms I contrast in my work: the so-called “precautionary principle” vs. “permissionless Innovation” mindsets.]

Finally, Juma’s book could also be compared to another freshly released book, The Politics of Innovation, by Mark Zachary Taylor. Taylor’s book is also essential reading on this lamentable history of industrial protectionism and the resulting political opposition to change we have seen over time. [Note: Brent Skorup and provided many other high-tech cronyist case studies like these in our 2013 law review article, “A History of Cronyism and Capture in the Information Technology Sector.”]

To counter the prevalence of special interest influence and poor policymaking more generally, Juma stresses the need for evidence-based analysis and a corresponding rejection of fear-mongering and deceptive tactics by public officials and activist groups. He’s particularly concerned with “the use of demonization and false analogies to amplify the perception of risks associated with a new product.”

Accordingly, he would like to see improved educational and risk communication efforts aimed at better informing the public about risk trade-offs and the many potential future benefits of emerging technologies. “Learning how to communicate to the general public is an important aspect of reducing distrust [in new technologies],” Juma argues. (p. 312)

On the Pacing Problem

But Juma never really adequately squares that recommendation with another point he makes throughout the text about how “the pace of technological innovation is discernibly fast,” (p. 5) and how it is accelerating in an exponential fashion. “The implications of exponential growth will continue to elude political leaders if they persist in operating with linear worldviews.” (p. 14) But if it is indeed the case that things are moving that fast, then are we not potentially doomed to live in never-ending cycles of technopanics and misinformation campaigns about new technologies no matter how much education we try to do?

Regardless, Juma’s argument about the speed of modern technological change is quite valid and shared by many other scholars. He is essentially making the same case that Larry Downes did in his excellent 2009 book, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age. Downes argued that lawmaking in the information age is inexorably governed by the “law of disruption” or the fact that “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.”  This law, Downes said, is “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life,” and it will have profound implications for the way businesses, government, and culture evolve going forward.  “As the gap between the old world and the new gets wider,” he argued, “conflicts between social, economic, political, and legal systems” will intensify and “nothing can stop the chaos that will follow.”

Again, Juma makes that same point repeatedly throughout the chapters of his book. This is also a restatement of the so-called “pacing problem,” as it is called in the field of the philosophy of technology. I discussed the pacing problem at length in my recent review of Wendell Wallach’s important new book, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping beyond Our Control. Wallach nicely defined the pacing problem as “the gap between the introduction of a new technology and the establishment of laws, regulations, and oversight mechanisms for shaping its safe development.” “There has always been a pacing problem,” he noted but, like Juma, Wallach believes that modern technological innovation is occurring at an unprecedented pace, making it harder than ever to “govern” using traditional legal and regulatory mechanisms.

New Approaches to Technological Governance Needed

Both Wallach in A Dangerous Master and Juma in Innovation and Its Enemies struggle with how to solve this problem. Wallach advocates “soft law” mechanisms or even informal “Governance Coordinating Committees,” which would oversee the development of new technology policies and advise existing governmental institutions. Juma is somewhat ambiguous regarding potential solutions, but he does stress the general need for a flexible approach to policy, as he notes on pg. 252:

It is important to make clear distinctions between hazards and risks. It is necessary to find a legal framework for addressing hazards. But such a framework should not take the form of rigid laws whose adoption needs to be guided by evidence of harm. More flexible standards that allow continuous assessment of emerging safety issues related to a new product are another way to address hazards. This approach would allow for evidence-based regulation.

Beyond that Juma wants to see “entrepreneurialism exercised in the public arena” (p. 282) and calls for “decisive leaders to champion the application of new technologies.” (p. 283) He argues such leadership is needed to ensure that life-enriching technologies are not derailed by opponents of change.

On the other hand, Juma sees a broader role for policymakers in helping to counter some of the potential side effects associated with many emerging technologies. He highlights three primary areas of concern. First, he suggests political leaders might need to find ways “to help balance the benefits and risks of automation” due to the rapid rise of robotics and artificial intelligence. Second, he notes that synthetic biology and gene-editing will give rise to many thorny issues that require policymakers to balance “potentially extraordinary benefits and the risk of catastrophic consequences.” (p. 284)  Finally, he points out that medicine and healthcare are set to be radically transformed by emerging technologies, but they are also threatened by archaic policies and practices in many countries.

In each case, Juma hopes that “decisive,” “adaptive” and “flexible” leaders will steer a sensible policy course with an eye toward limiting “the spread of political unrest and resentment toward technological innovation.” (p. 284)  That’s a noble goal, but Juma remains a bit vague on the steps needed to accomplish that balancing act without tipping public policy in favor a full-blown precautionary principle-based regime for new technologies. Juma clearly wants to avoid that result, but it remains unclear how or where he would draw clear lines in the sand to prevent it from occurring while at the same time achieving “decisive leadership” aimed at balancing potential risks and benefits.

Similarly, his repeated calls in the closing chapter for “inclusive innovation” efforts and strategies sounds sensible in theory, but Juma speaks in abstract generalities about what the term means and doesn’t provide a clear vision for how that would translate into concrete actions that would not end up giving vested interests a veto over new forms of technological innovation that they disfavor.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Generally speaking, however, Juma wants this balance struck in favor of greater openness to change and an ongoing freedom to experiment with new technological capabilities. As he notes in his concluding chapter:

The biggest risk that society faces by adopting approaches that suppress innovation is that they amplify the activities of those who want to preserve the status quo by silencing those arguing for a more open future. […] Keeping the future open and experimenting in an inclusive and transparent way is more rewarding that imposing the dictum of old patterns. (pgs. 289, 316)

In that regard, the thing I liked most about Innovation and Its Enemies is the way throughout the text that Juma stressed the symbiotic relationship between risk-taking and progress. One of the ways he does so is by kicking off every chapter with a fun quote on that theme from some notable figure. He includes gems like these:

• “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.” – Samuel Johnson
• “Only those will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T.S. Eliot
• “If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.” – Geena Davis
• “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.” – Tom Peters

Of course, I was bound to enjoy his repeated discussion of this theme because that was the central thesis of my latest book, in which I made the argument that, “if we spend all our time living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy upon such fears—then many best-case scenarios will never come about.” Or more simply, as the old saying goes: “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

On Pastoral Myths

I also liked the way that Juma used his case studies to remind us how “the topics may have changed, but the tactics have not.” (p. 143) For example, much of the fear-mongering and deceptive tactics we have seen through the years are based on “pastoral ideals,” i.e., appeals to nature, farm life, old traditions, of just the proverbial “good old days,” whenever those supposedly were! “Demonizing innovation is often associated with campaigns to romanticize past products and practices,” Juma notes. “Opponents of innovation hark back to traditions as if traditions themselves were not inventions at some point in the past.” (p. 309)  So very true!

That was especially the case in battles over new farming methods and technologies, when opponents of change were frequently “championing a moral cause to preserve a way of life,” as Juma discusses in several chapters. (p. 129) New products or methods of production were repeatedly but wrongly characterized as dangerous simply because they were not supposedly “natural” or “traditional” enough in character.

Of course, if all farming and other work was to remain frozen in some past “natural” state, we’d all still be hunters and gathers struggling to find the next meal to put in our bellies. Or, if we were all still on the farms of the “good old days,” then we’d still be stuck using an ox and plow in the name of preserving the “traditional” ways of doing things.

Humanity has made amazing strides—including being able to feed more people more easily and cheaply than ever before—precisely because we broke with those old, “natural” traditions. Alas, many vested interests and even quite a few academics today still employ these same pastoral appeals and myths to oppose new forms of technological change. Juma’s case studies powerfully illustrate why that dynamic continues to be a driving force in innovation policy debates and how it has delayed the diffusion of many important new goods and services throughout history. When the opponents of change rest their case on pastoral myths and nostalgic arguments about the good old days we should remind them that the good old days weren’t really that great after all.

Conclusion

In closing, Innovation and Its Enemies earns my highest recommendation. Even though 2016 is only half done as I write this, Professor Juma’s book is probably already a shoo-in as my choice for best innovation policy book of the year. And I am certain that it will also go down as one of the decade’s most important innovation policy books. Buy the book now and read every word of it. It is well worth your time.

Additional material related to Juma’s book:

• Calestous Juma’s website at the Harvard Kennedy School
• Official book page for Innovation and Its Enemies
• Concise summary of the book from AAAS: “Why important innovations stall; understanding obstacles to change is key to future”
• Steven Overly, “Humans once opposed coffee and refrigeration. Here’s why we often hate new stuff,” Washington Post, July 21, 2016.
• Matt Ridley’s review of the book for The Times of London.

Other Related Books

In addition to the books that I already mentioned throughout this review, readers who find Juma’s book and the issues he discusses in it of interest should also consider reading these other books on innovation policy, technological governance, and regulatory capture.  Although many of them are more squarely focused on the information technology sector or other emerging technology fields, they all relate to the general subject matter and approach found throughout Juma’s book. [NOTE: Links, where provided, are to my reviews of these books.]

• The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, by Kevin Kelly (2016)
• Innovative Governance Models for Emerging Technologies, Gary E. Marchant, Kenneth W. Abbott & Braden Allenby (eds.), (2013)
• Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom ,by Rebecca MacKinnon (2012)
• Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance, by Milton Mueller (2010)
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by Tim Wu (2010)
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley (2010)
• Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis (2008)
• Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human, by Joel Garreau (2005)
• The Creation of Media, by Paul Starr (2005)
• Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet, by Debora Spar (2004)
• Questioning Technology, by Andrew Feenberg (1999)
• Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, by Carl Mitcham (1994)
• Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age, by Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983)

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. For example, today’s NPR’s Morning Edition program featured a segment by Tom Gjelten entitled, “Cybersecurity Bill: Vital Need Or Just More Rules?” that included the comments of Michael McConnell, a former director of National Intelligence, Here’s what McConnell said about cyberwar at the 6:30 mark of the show:

“this threat is so intrusive, it’s so serious, it could literally suck the life’s blood out of this country, and if we don’t address it, it’s going to be a severe impact and so I think we have no choice but to address it and some of that process will be regulatory.”

Wow, who knew the blood could literally be drained from our bodies by cyberattacks! Have the Chinese or Iranians developed a cyber-superweapon that can reach through our screens and suck the life right out of us? (Like a cross between Videodrome and Halloween III: Season of the Witch!)

I’m being silly, of course. And some might dismiss such rhetorical flourishes or even defend them in the name of “doing whatever it takes” to raise awareness about an important concern. But these fear-based tactics are dangerous. As Brito and Watkins note, “when a threat is inflated, the marketplace of ideas on which a democracy relies to make sound judgments—in particular, the media and popular debate—can become overwhelmed by fallacious information.” In my paper, I argue that technopanics and threat inflation can have many troubling ramifications. They can:

1. Foster animosities and suspicions among the citizenry;
2. Create distrust of many institutions, especially the press;
3. Often divert attention from actual, far more serious risks; and,
4. Lead to calls for information control.

But we shouldn’t expect such rhetorically tactics to subside any time soon. After all, bombastic predictions of an impending cyber-apocalypse are nothing new, especially because they are such an effective way to grab attention, headlines, and funding.

Back in January 1996, the conservative Weekly Standard magazine ran a truly over-the-top cover story by Charles J. Dunlap entitled “How We Lost the High-Tech War of 2007.” (The actual cover appears above and the whole outlandish article is worth reading for its comedic value if noting else.) It included a dramatic Tom Clancy-esque cover illustration of the U.S. Capitol building smoldering in flames after an apparent cyber-attack of some sort.  Of course, there was no High-Tech War of 2007. But talk is cheap and there are few downsides to using such alarmist tactics. Pessimistic critics who use threat inflation to advance their causes are rarely held accountable when their panicky predictions fail to come to pass. As journalist Matt Ridley correctly observes, “Pessimism has always been big box office.”  Bad news sells, and there are always plenty of buyers.

It’s a shame rational debate is increasing impossible in this and other Internet policy arenas.

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.

These techno-panics are almost always disproportionate to the real risk posed by new media and technology, which typically do not have the corrupting influence on youth that older generations fear.  Parents and public policymakers alike need to remember they were once kids, too, and managed to live through many of the same fears and concerns about media and popular culture. As the late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[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.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”

The better response by both parents and policymakers is a measured and balanced approach to children’s exposure to media content and online interactions.  All-or-nothing extremes are never going to work.  In particular, techno-panics are hopelessly counter-productive. “Fear, in many cases, is leading to overreaction, which in turn could give rise to greater problems as young people take detours around the roadblocks we think we are erecting,” argue John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. What parents, educators, and policymakers need to understand, they argue, “is that the traditional values and common sense that have served them well in the past will be relevant in this new world, too.”

Most simply, we need to be willing to talk to our kids about the new technologies and cultural developments that shape their generation. When we as parents (or policymakers) do not fully comprehend or appreciate the new-fangled gadget in our kids’ pocket—or whatever they are playing, watching, or listening to on it—instead of engaging in demagoguery and driving a wedge between us and them, we should instead invite them to have a conversation with us about it.  Ask three simple questions to get that conversation started: “What is this new thing all about?”  “Tell me how you use it.”  “Why is it important to you?”  Once you’ve got them talking to you, good ‘ol fashion common sense and timeless parenting principles should kick in. “Do you understand why too much of this might be bad for you?” “Will you please come talk to me if you don’t understand something you’ve seen or heard?” And so on.

In sum, it’s about parental responsibility and rational, measured responses. The “techno-panic” mentality, by contrast, creates distrust and distance between our kids and us. As Anne Collier of Net Family News notes, techno-panics “cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.”

Parents and policymakers need to engage kids in an ongoing conversation about the technologies du jour—even when we don’t fully understand or appreciate them.

————— [printable Scribd version follows] —————

“Against Techno-Panics” by Adam Thierer, PFF (July 2009 – Inside ALEC) http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=17392730&access_key=key-2gdkqylyeu5h376buyyi&page=1&version=1&viewMode=