The endless apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding Net Neutrality and many other tech policy debates proves there’s no downside to gloom-and-doomism as a rhetorical strategy. Being a techno-Jeremiah nets one enormous media exposure and even when such a person has been shown to be laughably wrong, the press comes back for more. Not only is there is no penalty for hyper-pessimistic punditry, but the press actually furthers the cause of such “fear entrepreneurs” by repeatedly showering them with attention and letting them double-down on their doomsday-ism. Bad news sells, for both the pundit and the press.

But what is most remarkable is that the press continues to label these preachers of the techno-apocalypse as “experts” despite a track record of failed predictions. I suppose it’s because, despite all the failed predictions, they are viewed as thoughtful & well-intentioned. It is another reminder that John Stuart Mill’s 1828 observation still holds true today: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”

Additional Reading:

• Regarding the Use of Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Policy Debates (10/29/14)
• The Problem with “Pessimism Porn” (5/23/14)
• Journalists, Technopanics & the Risk Response Continuum (7/15/12)
• How & Why the Press Sometimes “Sells Digital Fear” (4/8/12)
• law review article: “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle” (2013)

How is it that we humans have again and again figured out how to assimilate new technologies into our lives despite how much those technologies “unsettled” so many well-established personal, social, cultural, and legal norms?

In recent years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking through that question in a variety of blog posts (“Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society”), law review articles (“Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle”), opeds (“Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”), and books (See chapter 4 of my new book, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom”).

It’s fair to say that this issue — how individuals, institutions, and cultures adjust to technological change — has become a personal obsession of mine and it is increasingly the unifying theme of much of my ongoing research agenda. The economic ramifications of technological change are part of this inquiry, of course, but those economic concerns have already been the subject of countless books and essays both today and throughout history. I find that the social issues associated with technological change — including safety, security, and privacy considerations — typically get somewhat less attention, but are equally interesting. That’s why my recent work and my new book narrow the focus to those issues.

Optimistic (“Heaven”) vs. Pessimistic (“Hell”) Scenarios

Modern thinking and scholarship on the impact of technological change on societies has been largely dominated by skeptics and critics.

In the past century, for example, French philosopher Jacques Ellul ( The Technological Society), German historian Oswald Spengler (Man and Technics), and American historian Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization) penned critiques of modern technological processes that took a dour view of technological innovation and our collective ability to adapt positively to it. (Concise summaries of their thinking can be found in Christopher May’s edited collection of essays, Key Thinkers for the Information Society.)

These critics worried about the subjugation of humans to “technique” or “technics” and feared that technology and technological processes would come to control us before we learned how to control them. Media theorist Neil Postman was the most notable of the modern information technology critics and served as the bridge between the industrial era critics (like Ellul, Spengler, and Mumford) and some of today’s digital age skeptics (like Evgeny Morozov and Nick Carr). Postman decried the rise of a “technopoly” — “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” — that would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.” We see that attitude on display in countless works of technological criticism since then.

Of course, there’s been some pushback from some futurists and technological enthusiasts. But there’s often a fair amount of irrational exuberance at work in their tracts and punditry. Many self-proclaimed “futurists” have predicted that various new technologies would produce a nirvana that would overcome human want, suffering, ignorance, and more.

In a 2010 essay, I labeled these two camps technological “pessimists” and “optimists.” It was a crude and overly-simplistic dichotomy, but it was an attempt to begin sketching out a rough taxonomy of the personalities and perspectives that we often seen pitted against each other in debates about the impact of technology on culture and humanity.

Sadly, when I wrote that earlier piece, I was not aware of a similar (and much better) framing of this divide that was developed by science writer Joel Garreau in his terrific 2005 book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human. In that book, Garreau is thinking in much grander terms about technology and the future than I was in my earlier essay. He was focused on how various emerging technologies might be changing our very humanity and he notes that narratives about these issues are typically framed in “Heaven” versus “Hell” scenarios.

Under the “Heaven” scenario, technology drives history relentlessly, and in almost every way for the better. As Garreau describes the beliefs of the Heaven crowd, they believe that going forward, “almost unimaginably good things are happening, including the conquering of disease and poverty, but also an increase in beauty, wisdom, love, truth, and peace.” (p. 130) By contrast, under the “Hell” scenario, “technology is used for extreme evil, threatening humanity with extinction.” (p. 95) Garreau notes that what unifies the Hell scenario theorists is the sense that in “wresting power from the gods and seeking to transcend the human condition,” we end up instead creating a monster — or maybe many different monsters — that threatens our very existence. Garreau says this “Frankenstein Principle” can be seen in countless works of literature and technological criticism throughout history, and it is still very much with us today. (p. 108)

Theories of Collapse: Why Does Doomsaying Dominate Discussions about New Technologies?

Indeed, in examining the way new technologies and inventions have long divided philosophers, scientists, pundits, and the general public, one can find countless examples of that sort of fear and loathing at work. “Armageddon has a long and distinguished history,” Garreau notes. “Theories of progress are mirrored by theories of collapse.” (p. 149)

In that regard, Garreau rightly cites Arthur Herman’s magisterial history of apocalyptic theories, The Idea of Decline in Western History, which documents “declinism” over time. The irony of much of this pessimistic declinist thinking, Herman notes, is that:

In effect, the very things modern society does best — providing increasing economic affluence, equality of opportunity, and social and geographic mobility — are systematically deprecated and vilified by its direct beneficiaries. None of this is new or even remarkable.” (p. 442)

Why is that? Why has the “Hell” scenario been such a dominant reoccurring theme in past writing and commentary throughout history, even though the general trend has been steady improvements in human health, welfare, and convenience?

There must be something deeply rooted in the human psyche that accounts for this tendency. As I have discussed in my new book as well as my big “Technopanics” law review article, our innate tendency to be pessimistic but also want to be certain about the future means that “the gloom-mongers have it easy,” as author Dan Gardner argues in his book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better. He continues on to note of the techno-doomsday pundits:

Their predictions are supported by our intuitive pessimism, so they feel right to us. And that conclusion is bolstered by our attraction to certainty. As strange as it sounds, we want to believe the expert predicting a dark future is exactly right, because knowing that the future will be dark is less tormenting than suspecting it. Certainty is always preferable to uncertainty, even when what’s certain is disaster. (p. 140-1)

Similarly, in his new book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, Clive Thompson notes that “dystopian predictions are easy to generate” and “doomsaying is emotionally self-protective: if you complain that today’s technology is wrecking the culture, you can tell yourself you’re a gimlet-eyed critic who isn’t hoodwinked by high-tech trends and silly, popular activities like social networking. You seem like someone who has a richer, deeper appreciation for the past and who stands above the triviality of today’s life.” (p. 283)

Another explanation is that humans are sometimes very poor judges of the relative risks to themselves or those close to them. Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, notes:

The mind is more comfortable in reckoning probabilities in terms of the relative frequency of remembered or imagined events. That can make recent and memorable events—a plane crash, a shark attack, an anthrax infection—loom larger in one’s worry list than more frequent and boring events, such as the car crashes and ladder falls that get printed beneath the fold on page B14. And it can lead risk experts to speak one language and ordinary people to hear another. (p. 232)

Put simply, there exists a wide variety of explanations for why our collective first reaction to new technologies often is one of dystopian dread. In my work, I have identified several other factors, including: generational differences; hyper-nostalgia; media sensationalism; special interest pandering to stoke fears and sell products or services; elitist attitudes among intellectuals; and the so-called “third-person effect hypothesis,” which posits that when some people encounter perspectives or preferences at odds with their own, they are more likely to be concerned about the impact of those things on others throughout society and to call on government to “do something” to correct or counter those perspectives or preferences.

Some combination of these factors ends up driving the initial resistance we have see to new technologies that disrupted long-standing social norms, traditions, and institutions. In the extreme, it results in that gloom-and-doom, sky-is-falling disposition in which we are repeatedly told how humanity is about to be steam-rolled by some new invention or technological development.

The “Prevail” (or “Muddling Through”) Scenario

“The good news is that end-of-the-world predictions have been around for a very long time, and none of them has yet borne fruit,” Garreau reminds us. (p. 148) Why not? Let’s get back to his framework for the answer. After discussing the “Heaven” (optimistic) and “Hell” (skeptical or pessimistic) scenarios cast about by countless tech writers throughout history, Garreau outlines a third, and more pragmatic “Prevail” option, which views history “as a remarkably effective paean to the power of humans to muddle through extraordinary circumstances.”

That pretty much sums up my own perspective on things, and in the remainder of this essay I want sketch out the reasons why I think the “prevail” or “muddling through” scenario offers the best explanation for how we learn to cope with technological disruption and prosper in the process.

As Garreau explains it, under the “Prevail” scenario, “humans shape and adapt [technology] in entirely new directions.” (p. 95) “Just because the problems are increasing doesn’t mean solutions might not also be increasing to match them,” he rightly notes. (p. 154) As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid noted in their excellent 2001, “ Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists”:

technological and social systems shape each other. The same is true on a larger scale. […] Technology and society are constantly forming and reforming new dynamic equilibriums with far-reaching implications. The challenge for futurology (and for all of us) is to see beyond the hype and past the over-simplifications to the full import of these new sociotechnical formations.  Social and technological systems do not develop independently; the two evolve together in complex feedback loops, wherein each drives, restrains and accelerates change in the other.

It is this process of “constantly forming and reforming new dynamic equilibriums” that interests me most. In a recent exchange with Michael Sacasas – one of the most thoughtful modern technology critics I’ve come across — I noted that the nature of individual and societal acclimation to technological change is worthy of serious investigation if for no other reason that it has continuously happened! What I hope to better understand is the process by which we humans have again and again figured out how to assimilate new technologies into their lives despite how much those technologies disrupted our personal, social, economic, cultural, and legal norms.

In a response to me, Sacasas put forth the following admonition: “That people eventually acclimate to changes precipitated by the advent of a new technology does not prove that the changes were inconsequential or benign.” This is undoubtedly true, but it does not undermine the reality of societal adaptation. What can we learn from this? What were the mechanics of that adaptive process? As social norms, personal habits, and human relationships were disrupted, what helped us muddle through and find a way of coping with new technologies? Likewise, as existing markets and business models were disrupted, how were new ones formulated in response to the given technological disruption? Finally, how did legal norms and institutions adjust to those same changes?

Of course, this raises an entirely different issue: What metrics are we using to judge whether “the changes were inconsequential or benign”? As I noted in my exchange with Sacasas, at the end of the day, it may be that we won’t be able to even agree on a standard by which to make that judgment and will instead have to settle for a rough truce about what history has to teach us that might be summed up by the phrase: “something gained, something lost.”

Resiliency: Why Do the Skeptics Never Address It (and Its Benefits)?

Nonetheless, I believe that while technological change often brings sweeping and quite consequential change, there is great value in the very act of living through it.

In my work, including my latest little book, I argue that humans have exhibited the uncanny ability to adapt to changes in their environment, bounce back from adversity, and learn to be resilient over time. A great deal of wisdom is born of experience, including experiences that involve risk and the possibility of occasional mistakes and failures while both developing new technologies and learning how to live with them. I believe it wise to continue to be open to new forms of innovation and technological change, not only because it provides breathing space for future entrepreneurialism and invention, but also because it provides an opportunity to see how societal attitudes toward new technologies evolve — and to learn from it. More often than not, I argue, citizens have found ways to adapt to technological change by employing a variety of coping mechanisms, new norms, or other creative fixes.

What we’re talking about here is resiliency. Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, authors of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, define resilience as “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.” (p. 7) “To improve your resilience,” they note, “is to enhance your ability to resist being pushed from your preferred valley, while expanding the range of alternatives that you can embrace if you need to. This is what researchers call preserving adaptive capacity—the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling once core purpose—and it’s an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility.” (p. 7-8, emphasis in original) Moreover, they note, “by encouraging adaptation, agility, cooperation, connectivity, and diversity, resilience-thinking can bring us to a different way of being in the world, and to a deeper engagement with it.” (p. 16)

Even if you one doesn’t agree with all of that, again, I would think one would find great value in studying the process by which such adaptation happens precisely because it does happen so regularly. And then we could argue about whether it was all really worth it! Specially, was it worth whatever we lost in the process (i.e., a change in our old moral norms, our old privacy norms, our old institutions, our old business models, our old laws, or whatever else)?

As Sacasas correctly argues, “That people before us experienced similar problems does not mean that they magically cease being problems today.” Again, quite right. On the other hand, the fact that people and institutions learned to cope with those concerns and become more resilient over time is worthy of serious investigation because somehow we “muddled through” before and we’ll have to muddle through again. And, again, what we learned from living through that process may be extremely valuable in its own right.

Of Course, Muddling Through Isn’t Always Easy

Now, let’s be honest about this process of “muddling through”: it isn’t always neat or pretty. To put it crudely, sometimes muddling through really sucks! Think about the modern technologies that violate our visceral sense of privacy and personal space today. I am an intensely private person and if I had a life motto it would probably be: “ Leave Me Alone!” Yet, sometimes there’s just no escaping the pervasive reach of modern technologies and processes. On the other hand, I know that, like so many others, I derive amazing benefits from all these new technologies, too. So, like most everyone else I put up with the downsides because, on net, there are generally more upsides.

Almost every digital service that we use today presents us with these trade-offs. For example, email has allowed us to connect with a constantly growing universe of our fellow humans and organizations. Yet, spam clutters our mailboxes and the sheer volume of email we get sometimes overwhelms us. Likewise, in just the past five years, smartphones have transformed our lives in so many ways for the better in terms of not just personal convenience but also personal safety. On the other hand, smartphones have become more than a bit of nuisance in certain environments (theaters, restaurants, and other closed spaces.) And they also put our safety at risk when we use them while driving automobiles.

But, again, we adjust to most of these new realities and then we find constructive solutions to the really hard problems – yes, and that sometimes includes legal remedies to rectify serious harms. But a certain amount of social adaptation will, nonetheless, be required. Law can only slightly slow that inevitability; it can’t stop it entirely. And as messy and uncomfortable as muddling through can be, we have to (a) be aware of what we gain in the process and (b) ask ourselves what the cost of taking the alternative path would be. Attempts to through a wrench in the works and derail new innovations or delay various types of technological change are always going to be tempting, but such interventions will come at a very steep cost: less entreprenurialism, diminished competition, stagnant markets, higher prices, and fewer choices for citizens. As I note in my new book, if we spend all our time living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios — and premising public policy upon such fears — it means that many best-case scenarios will never come about.

Social Resistance / Pressure Dynamics

There’s another part to this story that often gets overlooked. “Muddling through” isn’t just some sort of passive process where individuals and institutions have to figure out how to cope with technological change. Rather, there is an active dynamic at work, too. Individuals and institutions push back and actively shape their tools and systems.

In a recent Wired essay on public attitudes about emerging technologies such as the controversial Google Glass, Issie Lapowsky noted that:

If the stigma surrounding Google Glass (or, perhaps more specifically, “Glassholes”) has taught us anything, it’s that no matter how revolutionary technology may be, ultimately its success or failure ride on public perception. Many promising technological developments have died because they were ahead of their times. During a cultural moment when the alleged arrogance of some tech companies is creating a serious image problem, the risk of pushing new tech on a public that isn’t ready could have real bottom-line consequences.

In my new book, I spend some time think about this process of “norm-shaping” through social pressure, activist efforts, educational steps, and even public shaming. A recent Ars Technica essay by Joe Silver offered some powerful examples of how when “shamed on Twitter, corporations do an about-face.” Silver notes that “A few recent case-study examples of individuals who felt they were wronged by corporations and then took to the Twitterverse to air their grievances show how a properly placed tweet can be a powerful weapon for consumers to combat corporate malfeasance.” In my book and in recent law review articles, I have provided other examples how this works at both a corporate and individual level to constrain improper behavior and protect various social norms.

Edmund Burke once noted that, “Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.” Cristina Bicchieri, a leading behavioral ethicist, calls social norms “the grammar of society” because,

like a collection of linguistic rules that are implicit in a language and define it, social norms are implicit in the operations of a society and make it what it is. Like a grammar, a system of norms specifies what is acceptable and what is not in a social group. And analogously to a grammar, a system of norms is not the product of human design and planning.

Put simply, more than law can regulate behavior — whether it is organizational behavior or individual behavior. It’s yet another way we learn to cope and “muddle through” over time. Again, check out my book for several other examples.

A Case Study: The Long-Standing “Problem” of Photography

Let’s bring all this together and be more concrete about it by using a case study: photography. With all the talk of how unsettling various modern technological developments are, they really pale in comparison to just how jarring the advent of widespread public photography must have been in the late 1800s and beyond. “For the first time photographs of people could be taken without their permission—perhaps even without their knowledge,” notes Lawrence M. Friedman in his 2007 book, Guiding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy.

Thus, the camera was viewed as a highly disruptive force as photography became more widespread. In fact, the most important essay ever written on privacy law, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’s famous 1890 Harvard Law Review essay on “The Right to Privacy,” decried the spread of public photography. The authors lamented that “instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life” and claimed that “numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’”

Warren and Brandeis weren’t alone. Plenty of other critics existed and many average citizens were probably outraged by the rise of cameras and public photography. Yet, personal norms and cultural attitudes toward cameras and public photography evolved quite rapidly and they became ingrained in human experience. At the same time, social norms and etiquette evolved to address those who would use cameras in inappropriate, privacy-invasive ways.

Again, we muddled through. And we’ve had to continuously muddle through in this regard because photography presents us with a seemingly endless set of new challenges. As cameras grow still smaller and get integrated into other technologies (most recently, smartphones, wearable technologies, and private drones), we’ve had to learn to adjust and accommodate. With wearables technologies (check out Narrative, Butterflye, and Autographer, for example), personal drones (see “Drones are the future of selfies,”) and other forms of microphotography all coming online now, we’ll have to adjust still more and develop new norms and coping mechanisms. There’s never going to be an end to this adjustment process.

Toward Pragmatic Optimism

Should we really remain bullish about humanity’s prospects in the midst of all this turbulent change? I think so.

Again, long before the information revolution took hold, the industrial revolution produced its share of cultural and economic backlashes, and it is still doing so today. Most notably, many Malthusian skeptics and environmental critics lamented the supposed strain of population growth and industrialization on social and economic life. Catastrophic predictions followed.

In his 2007 book, Prophecies of Doom and Scenarios of Progress, Paul Dragos Aligicia, a colleague of mine at the Mercatus Center, documented many of these industrial era “prophecies of doom” and described how this “doomsday ideology” was powerfully critiqued by a handful of scholars — most notably Herman Kahn and Julian Simon. Aligicia explains that Kahn and Simon argued for, “the alternative paradigm, the pro-growth intellectual tradition that rejected the prophecies of doom and called for realism and pragmatism in dealing with the challenge of the future.”

Kahn and Simon were pragmatic optimists or what author Matt Ridley calls “rational optimists.” They were bullish about the future and the prospects for humanity, but they were not naive regarding the many economic and scosial challenges associated with technological change. Like Kahn and Simon, we should embrace the amazing technological changes at work in today’s information age but with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change.

But the rational optimists never get as much attention as the critics and catastrophists. “For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines even though optimists have far more often been right,” observes Ridley. “Arch-pessimists are feted, showered with honors and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes.” At least part of the reason for that, as already noted, goes back to the amazing rhetorical power of good intentions. Techno-pessimists often exhibit a deep passion about their particular cause and are typically given more than just the benefit of doubt in debates about progress and the future; they are treated as superior to opponents who challenge their perspectives or proposals. When a privacy advocate says they are just looking out consumers, or an online safety claims they have the best interests of children in mind, or a consumer advocate argues that regulation is needed to protect certain people from some amorphous harm, they are assuming the moral high ground through the assertion of noble-minded intentions. Even if their proposals will often fail to bring about the better state of affairs they claim or derail life-enriching innovations, they are more easily forgiven for those mistakes precisely because of their fervent claim of noble-minded intentions.

If intentions are allowed to trump empiricism and a general openness to change, however, the results for a free society and for human progress will be profoundly deleterious. That is why, when confronted with pessimistic, fear-based arguments, the pragmatic optimist must begin by granting that the critics clearly have the best of intentions, but then point out how intentions can only get us so far in the real-world, which is full of complex trade-offs.

The pragmatic optimist must next meticulously and dispassionately outline the many reasons why restricting progress or allowing planning to enter the picture will have many unintended consequences and hidden costs. The trade-offs must be explained in clear terms. Examples of previous interventions that went wrong must be proffered.

The Evidence Speaks for Itself

Luckily, we pragmatic optimists have plenty of evidence working in our favor when making this case. As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes noted in his 1999 book, Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines Systems And The Human World:

it’s surprising that [many intellectual] don’t value technology; by any fair assessment, it has reduced suffering and improved welfare across the past hundred years. Why doesn’t this net balance of benevolence inspire at least grudging enthusiasm for technology among intellectuals? (p. 23)

Great question, and one that we should never stop asking the techno-critics to answer. After all, as Joel Mokyr notes in his wonderful 1990 book, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, “Without [technological creativity], we would all still live nasty and short lives of toil, drudgery, and discomfort.” (p. viii) “Technological progress, in that sense, is worthy of its name,” he says. “It has led to something that we may call an ‘achievement,’ namely the liberation of a substantial portion of humanity from the shackles of subsistence living.” (p. 288) Specifically,

The riches of the post-industrial society have meant longer and healthier lives, liberation from the pains of hunger, from the fears of infant mortality, from the unrelenting deprivation that were the part of all but a very few in preindustrial society. The luxuries and extravagances of the very rich in medieval society pale compared to the diet, comforts, and entertainment available to the average person in Western economies today. (p. 303)

In his new book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, Robert Bryce hammers this point home when he observes that:

The pessimistic worldview ignores an undeniable truth: more people are living longer, healthier, freer, more peaceful, lives than at any time in human history… the plain reality is that things are getting better, a lot better, for tens of millions of people around the world. Dozens of factors can be cited for the improving conditions of humankind. But the simplest explanation is that innovation is allowing us to do more with less.

This is framework Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, and the other champions of progress used to deconstruct and refute the pessimists of previous eras. In line with that approach, we modern pragmatic optimists must continuously point to the unappreciated but unambiguous benefits of technological innovation and dynamic change. But we should also continue to remind the skeptics of the amazing adaptability of the human species in the face of adversity. As Kahn taught us long ago, is that when it comes to technological progress and humanity’s ingenious responses to it, “we should expect to go on being surprised” — and in mostly positive ways. Humans have consistently responded to technological change in creative, and sometimes completely unexpected ways. There’s no reason to think we can’t get through modern technological disruptions using similar coping and adaptation strategies. As Mokyr noted in his recent City Journal essay on “The Next Age of Invention”:

Much like medication, technological progress almost always has side effects, but bad side effects are rarely a good reason not to take medication and a very good reason to invest in the search for second-generation drugs. To a large extent, technical innovation is a form of adaptation—not only to externally changing circumstances but also to previous adaptations.

In sum, we need to have a little faith in the ability of humanity to adjust to an uncertain future, no matter what it throws at us. We’ll muddle through and come out better because of what we have learned in the process, just as we have so many times before.

I’ll give venture capitalist Marc Andreessen the last word on this since he’s been on an absolute tear on Twitter lately when discussing many of the issues I’ve raised in this essay. While addressing the particular fear that automation is running amuck and that robots will eat all our jobs, Andreessen eloquently noted:

We have no idea what the fields, industries, businesses, and jobs of the future will be. We just know we will create an enormous number of them. Because if robots and AI replace people for many of the things we do today, the new fields we create will be built on the huge number of people those robots and AI systems made available. To argue that huge numbers of people will be available but we will find nothing for them (us) to do is to dramatically short human creativity. And I am way long human creativity.

Me too, buddy. Me too.

Additional Reading:

Journal articles & book chapters:

• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (2014)
• “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, 14 (2013): 309–86.
• “The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net from Its Detractors,” in The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet, ed.Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus (Washington, DC:Tech Freedom, 2010), 57–87.
• “The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control Is Failing,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 36 (2013): 409–55.
• “Privacy Law’s Precautionary Principle Problem,” Maine Law Review, Vol. 66, No. 2 (2014): 467-86.

Blog posts:

• “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” Technology Liberation Front, January 31, 2010.
• “Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?” Technology Liberation Front, March 4, 2013.
• “What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?” Technology Liberation Front, May 23, 2013.
• “Planning for Hypothetical Horribles in Tech Policy Debates,” Technology Liberation Front, August 6, 2013.
• “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy,” Technology Liberation Front, August 1, 2013.
• “Can We Adapt to the Internet of Things?” IAPP Privacy Perspectives, June 19, 2013.
• “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” Forbes, January 8, 2012.
• “The Six Things That Drive ‘Technopanics,’” Forbes, March 4, 2012.
• “10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry about Thanks to the Information Revolution,” Forbes, December 18, 2011.

I am pleased to announce the release of my latest book, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.” It’s a short manifesto (just under 100 pages) that condenses — and attempts to make more accessible — arguments that I have developed in various law review articles, working papers, and blog posts over the past few years. I have two goals with this book.

First, I attempt to show how the central fault line in almost all modern technology policy debates revolves around “the permission question,” which asks: Must the creators of new technologies seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy their innovations? How that question is answered depends on the disposition one adopts toward new inventions. Two conflicting attitudes are evident.

One disposition is known as the “precautionary principle.” Generally speaking, it refers to the belief that new innovations should be curtailed or disallowed until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harms to individuals, groups, specific entities, cultural norms, or various existing laws, norms, or traditions.

The other vision can be labeled “permissionless innovation.” It refers to the notion that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue unabated and problems, if they develop at all, can be addressed later.

I argue that we are witnessing a grand clash of visions between these two mindsets today in almost all major technology policy discussions today.

The second major objective of the book, as is made clear by the title, is to make a forceful case in favor of the latter disposition of “permissionless innovation.” I argue that policymakers should unapologetically embrace and defend the permissionless innovation ethos — not just for the Internet but also for all new classes of networked technologies and platforms. Some of the specific case studies discussed in the book include: the “Internet of Things” and wearable technologies, smart cars and autonomous vehicles, commercial drones, 3D printing, and various other new technologies that are just now emerging.

I explain how precautionary principle thinking is increasingly creeping into policy discussions about these technologies. The urge to regulate preemptively in these sectors is driven by a variety of safety, security, and privacy concerns, which are discussed throughout the book. Many of these concerns are valid and deserve serious consideration. However, I argue that if precautionary-minded regulatory solutions are adopted in a preemptive attempt to head-off these concerns, the consequences will be profoundly deleterious.

The central lesson of the booklet is this: Living in constant fear of hypothetical worst-case scenarios — and premising public policy upon them — means that best-case scenarios will never come about. When public policy is shaped by precautionary principle reasoning, it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity.

Again, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the various problems created by these highly disruptive technologies. But how we address these concerns matters greatly. If and when problems develop, there are many less burdensome ways to address them than through preemptive technological controls. The best solutions to complex social problems are almost always organic and “bottom-up” in nature. Luckily, there exists a wide variety of constructive approaches that can be tapped to address or alleviate concerns associated with new innovations. These include:

• education and empowerment efforts (including media literacy, digital citizenship efforts);
• social pressure from activists, academics, and the press and the public more generally.
• voluntary self-regulation and adoption of best practices (including privacy and security “by design” efforts); and,
• increased transparency and awareness-building efforts to enhance consumer knowledge about how new technologies work.

Such solutions are almost always superior to top-down, command-and-control regulatory edits and bureaucratic schemes of a “Mother, May I?” (i.e., permissioned) nature. The problem with “top-down” traditional regulatory systems is that they often tend to be overly-rigid, bureaucratic, inflexible, and slow to adapt to new realities. They focus on preemptive remedies that aim to predict the future, and future hypothetical problems that may not ever come about. Worse yet, administrative regulation generally preempts or prohibits the beneficial experiments that yield new and better ways of doing things. It raises the cost of starting or running a business or non-business venture, and generally discourages activities that benefit society.

To the extent that other public policies are needed to guide technological developments, simple legal principles are greatly preferable to technology-specific, micro-managed regulatory regimes. Again, ex ante (preemptive and precautionary) regulation is often highly inefficient, even dangerous. To the extent that any corrective legal action is needed to address harms, ex post measures, especially via the common law (torts, class actions, etc.), are typically superior. And the Federal Trade Commission will, of course, continue to play a backstop here by utilizing the broad consumer protection powers it possesses under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” In recent years, the FTC has already brought and settled many cases involving its Section 5 authority to address identity theft and data security matters. If still more is needed, enhanced disclosure and transparency requirements would certainly be superior to outright bans on new forms of experimentation or other forms of heavy-handed technological controls.

In the end, however, I argue that, to the maximum extent possible, our default position toward new forms of technological innovation must remain: “innovation allowed.” That is especially the case because, more often than not, citizens find ways to adapt to technological change by employing a variety of coping mechanisms, new norms, or other creative fixes. We should have a little more faith in the ability of humanity to adapt to the challenges new innovations create for our culture and economy. We have done it countless times before. We are creative, resilient creatures. That’s why I remain so optimistic about our collective ability to confront the challenges posed by these new technologies and prosper in the process.

If you’re interested in taking a look, you can find a free PDF of the book at the Mercatus Center website or you can find out how to order it from there as an eBook. Hardcopies are also available. I’ll be doing more blogging about the book in coming weeks and months. The debate between the “permissionless innovation” and “precautionary principle” worldviews is just getting started and it promises to touch every tech policy debate going forward.

Related Essays :

• “The Growing Conflict of Visions over the Internet of Things & Privacy,” Technology Liberation Front, January 14, 2014.
• “CES 2014 Report: The Internet of Things Arrives, but Will Washington Welcome It?” Technology Liberation Front, January 8, 2014.
• “Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?” Technology Liberation Front, March 4, 2013.
• “What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?” Technology Liberation Front, May 23, 2013.
• “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy,” Technology Liberation Front, August 1, 2013.
• “Planning for Hypothetical Horribles in Tech Policy Debates,” Technology Liberation Front, August 6, 2013.
• “Edith Ramirez’s ‘Big Data’ Speech: Privacy Concerns Prompt Precautionary Principle Thinking,” Technology Liberation Front, August 29, 2013.
• “When It Comes to Information Control, Everybody Has a Pet Issue & Everyone Will Be Disappointed,” Technology Liberation Front, April 29, 2011.
• “Copyright, Privacy, Property Rights & Information Control: Common Themes, Common Challenges,” Technology Liberation Front, April 10, 2012.
• “Can We Adapt to the Internet of Things?” IAPP Privacy Perspectives, June 19, 2013.
• “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” Forbes, January 8, 2012.
• “The Six Things That Drive ‘Technopanics,’” Forbes, March 4, 2012.

Just last week I was discussing the terrifically interesting work of Michael Sacasas who pens The Frailest Thing, a poetic blog about technology and culture. [see: “Information Revolutions & Cultural / Economic Tradeoffs“] I highly recommend you follow his blog even if you struggle to keep up with his brilliance, as I often do.  He posted another great essay today entitled, “Nostalgia: The Third Wave,” in which he discusses the work of the late social critic Christopher Lasch and his work on memory and nostalgia. Go read the entire thing since I cannot possible do it justice here. Anyway, I posted a short comment over there that I thought I would just republish here in case others are interested. I find the issue of nostalgia to be quite interesting.

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Michael… I’m currently finishing up a paper looking at the causes of various “techno-panics” over time. I try to group together a variety of theories and possible explanations, one of which is labeled “Hyper-Nostalgia, Pessimistic Bias & Soft Ludditism.” I don’t go into anywhere near the detail you do here, but I did unearth a number of interesting things while conducting research. [Update: That paper on “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” was published by the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology in early 2013.]

Have you ever come across the book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, by the poet Susan Stewart? She notes that what is ironic about nostalgia is that it is rooted in something typically unknown by the proponent.  Consequently, she argues that nostalgia represents “a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience.”  Too often, Stewart observes, “nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face” and thus becomes a “social disease.”

That’s probably a bit extreme, but it does help explain why some intellectuals, social critics, and policymakers occasionally demonize new mediums, technologies, or forms of culture. If one if suffering from a rather extreme version of what Michael Shermer refers to this as “rosy retrospection bias,” (The Believing Brain, 2011) or “the tendency to remember past events as being more positive than they actually were,” then it would hardly be surprising that they would adopt attitudes and policies that disfavor the new and different.   

Indeed, many critics fear how technological evolution challenges the old order, traditional values, settled norms, traditional business models, and existing institutions. Stated differently, by its nature, technology disrupts settled matters and, therefore, “the shock of the new often brings out critics eager to warn us away,” notes Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil.  Occasionally, this marriage of distaste for the new and a longing for the past (often referred to as a “simpler time” or “the good old days”) yields the sort of a moral panics or technopanics I discuss in my paper. In particular, cultural critics and advocacy groups benefit from the use of nostalgia by playing into, or whipping up, fears that there was a better time we’ve lost and then suggesting “steps should be taken” to help us return to that time.

I regard that as dangerous because it implies someone knows how to set society back on that supposedly better course even though they haven’t likely taken into account the full costs of even attempting to do so. Those costs could be speech-related (censorship), social (unnecessary changes in how we educate children) or economic (disruption of new technologies or business methods). That would be the downside of hyper-nostalgia if given the effect of law.

I guess it all comes back to what the Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume observed in a 1777 essay: “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and extensive learning.” The problem is, when we act on those well-ingrained instincts, it has consequences and those consequences could be profound.  Thus, I would argue we should establish a fairly high bar when it comes to nostalgic assertions about “a better time” to which some would have us return. Because in my eyes, those “good ‘ol days” — whenever those were — were rarely as great as some claim.

Of course, others might claim that I am, once again, just being too much of a Pollyanna!

My thanks to both Maria H. Andersen and Michael Sacasas for their thoughtful responses to my recent Forbes essay on “10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution.” They both go point by point through my Top 10 list and offer an alternative way of looking at each of the trends I identify. What their responses share in common is a general unease with the hyper-optimism of my Forbes piece. That’s understandable. Typically in my work on technological “optimism” and “pessimism” — and yes, I admit those labels are overly simplistic — I always try to strike a sensible balance between pollyannism and hyper-pessimism as it pertains to the impact of technological change on our culture and economy. I have called this middle ground position “pragmatic optimism.” In my Forbes essay, however, I was in full-blown pollyanna mode. That doesn’t mean I don’t generally feel very positive about the changes I itemized in that essay, rather, I just didn’t have the space in a 1,000-word column to identify the tradeoffs inherent in each trend. Thus, Andersen and Sacasas are rightfully pushing back against my lack of balance.

But there is a problem with their slightly pessimistic pushback, too. To better explain my own position and respond to Andersen and Sacasas, let me return to the story we hear again and again in discussion about technological change: the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. In the tale, the god Theuth comes to King Thamus and boasts of how Theuth’s invention of writing would improve the wisdom and memory of the masses relative to the oral tradition of learning.  King Thamus shot back, “the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.”  King Thamus then passed judgment himself about the impact of writing on society, saying he feared that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

After recounting Plato’s allegory in my essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” I noted how this same tension has played out in every subsequent debate about the impact of a new technology on culture, values, morals, language, learning, and so on. It is a never-ending cycle. Now, here’s the interesting thing about that allegory that you will be surprised to hear an optimist like me admit: King Thamus was right! Well, at least partially right. There is little doubt that the invention of writing largely displaced the tradition of oral learning and instruction. Let’s face it, once people knew they could write something down or go back and read a passage from an important text, what was the use in memorizing it? Thus, there was a clear cost associated with the advent of writing and printing: A diminished interest in committing lessons or texts to memory. More profoundly, one might argue this also diminished our cognitive capabilities by requiring less of a mental workout for our brains. Thus, had Nick Carr been around to document the Theuth-Thamus debate, he might have penned a book entitled, “Is Writing Making Us Stupid?” (I’m assuming everyone is aware of Nick’s recent article asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and his subsequent book, The Shallows, which discussed “what the Internet is doing to our brains.”) Of course, it would have been a bit ironic for Nick to write it all down, so perhaps he would have just memorized it all and verbally passed his analysis along to descendants and followers!

Anyway, here’s what I am getting at by returning to Plato’s allegory: Technological change forces tradeoffs upon us. It forces sacrifices. There are definitely losses. But, in each case, we must ask two essential questions:

(1) Don’t the benefits of technological change generally outweigh the costs? I think they generally do, and that’s why I tend to side with the optimists more often than not. Sure, we can find plenty of reasons to be nostalgic about the decline of letter-writing, the disappearance of expensive encyclopedias, the end of typing classes, the elimination of phone booths on the corner, the loss of community video stores or record stores, or any of the other things I identified in my Forbes essay. But we should consider the many ways in which those changes have generally benefited society and opened the door to new innovations, new ways of learning and communicating, and new forms of culture and expression.

(2) Even if we are skeptical about the benefits of technological change, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to take steps to slow down technological change? What sort of steps are we talking about? Who makes that call or determines those responses? These are difficult but essential questions. Too many social critics get a free pass when it comes to answering them. This is what always drives me batty when reading the work of Net pessimists like Neil Postman, Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier, etc. These guys excel at the art of the teardown. They can lambast the agents and elements of technological change with immense rhetorical power. At times, even I find their case convincing.  But these critics are horrible when it comes to proposing alternatives or constructive solutions. Often they have none. I believe it is the duty of a good social critic to offer constructive solutions to the problems they identify. One reason they probably don’t offer many is because they are simply afraid to admit that, if they could play God for a day, they probably would roll back the clock and slow or stop many forms of technological change.

The more constructive approach to these challenges comes back to education and empowerment. If we can be mature enough to (a) admit that pessimistic social critics have some valid concerns but that (b) the optimists are right about the benefits typically outweighing the costs, then the logical response is to take steps to educate people about technological change and empower them to deal with it. Other times, however, people simply have to learn how to adapt and be resilient through experimentation and coping strategies. It isn’t easy, of course. But education can help here, too. I’ve spent time trying to educate my father and other older relatives about how to use digital technologies they continue to be very uncomfortable with. I appreciate their concerns about privacy, security, and technological complexity. These are valid concerns or complaints. But these technologies are not going away and I have taken upon myself to help them assimilate the new tools and methods into their lives. I also mentor my children and guide their use of these new information technologies. They are surprisingly good at adapting to their new tools, but we must take to heart the lessons the social critics and pessimists offer about the downsides and dangers of some of those new tools.

As you can sense, my perspective here is very much shaped by the fact that I am, for the most part, a technological determinist. Not a rigid or “hard” tech determinist, but at least a “soft” one.  In a brilliant and highly provocative recently paper, “ Hasta La Vista Privacy, or How Technology Terminated Privacy,” Konstantinos K. Stylianou of the University of Pennsylvania Law School discusses varieties of technological determinism as it pertains to information control and noted:

In-between the two extremes (technology as the defining factor of change and technology as a mere tangent of change) and in a multitude of combinations falls the so called soft determinism; that is, variations of the combined effect of technology on one hand and human choices and actions on the other. (p. 46)

Unfortunately, Stylianou notes, “The scope of soft determinism is unfortunately so broad that is loses all normative value. Encapsulated in the axiom ‘human beings do make their world, but they are also made by it,’ soft determinism is reduced to the self-evident.”  Nonetheless, he argues, “a compromise can be reached by mixing soft and hard determinism in a blend that reserves for technology the predominant role only in limited cases,” since he believes “there are indeed technologies so disruptive by their very nature they cause a certain change regardless of other factors.” (p. 46) He concludes his essay by noting:

it seems reasonable to infer that the thrust behind technological progress is so powerful that it is almost impossible for traditional legislation to catch up. While designing flexible rules may be of help, it also appears that technology has already advanced to the degree that is is able to bypass or manipulate legislation. As a result, the cat-and-mouse chase game between the law and technology will probably always tip in favor of technology. It may thus be a wise choice for the law to stop underestimating the dynamics of technology, and instead adapt to embrace it. (p. 54)

That pretty much sums up where I’m at on most information policy issues and explains why I sound so fatalistic at times. But my soft determinism also explains why I feel it is so important to devise coping strategies to help us through the changes that the information revolution has ushered in and forced upon us. There’s just no putting the digital genie back in the bottle. We can wax nostalgic all we want about those supposedly “good ‘ol days” but they ain’t never coming back. And they weren’t that great anyway!

If this discussion interests you, you might want to read my book chapter from the book The Next Digital Decade, which was entitled, “The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net From Its Detractors.”   Oh, and if you don’t already have Michael Sacasas’s blog (The Frailest Thing) at the top of your RSS feed, add it now. Absolutely terrific reading, even when I don’t agree with (or even understand!) all of it.

I’m currently finishing up my next book. It addresses various strands of “Internet pessimism” and attempts to explain why all the gloom and doom theories we hear about the Internet’s impact on modern culture and economy are not generally warranted.  A key theme of my book is that most Internet pessimists overlook the importance of human adaptability in the face of technological change.  The amazing thing about humans is that we adapt so much better than other creatures. We learn how to use the new tools given to us and make them part of our lives and culture. The worst situations often bring out the most creative, innovative solutions. Media critic Jack Shafer has noted that “the techno-apocalypse never comes” because “cultures tend to assimilate and normalize new technology in ways the fretful never anticipate.”

In a cultural sense, humans have again and again adapted to technological change despite the radical disruptions to their lives, mores, manners, and methods of learning. As Aleks Krotoski recently points out in her new Guardian essay, “How the Internet Has Changed Our Concept of What Home Is”:

We are adaptable creatures and will work within the confines of our existing homes to integrate this new creature into our lives. We have already made the web part of our domestic ecologies and we continually imbue it with a sense of place. Perhaps its malleability is why it has been so successful and why we are willing to bring this interruptive technology into our most intimate worlds.

Human adaption also works magic in an economic sense. Entrepreneurs are constantly developing disruptive technologies that transform markets and expand opportunities. Innovators respond to incentives, including short-term spells of excessive “market power.” [More on that in my latest Forbes column, “No One Owns a Techno Crystal Ball.”]

Techno-pessimism and technopanics are born from irrational fears and a failure to appreciate that humans have, many times before, faced and conquered the technological unknown. Simply put, pessimists have very little faith in human ingenuity and resiliency.

In my latest weekly Forbes column is entitled “The Internet Isn’t Killing Our Culture or Democracy” and it’s a short review of the new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, by MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser. As I note in my essay, Pariser’s book covers some very familiar ground already plowed by others in the burgeoning Internet pessimism movement:

[The Filter Bubble] restates a thesis developed a decade ago in both Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com and Andrew L. Shapiro’s The Control Revolution, that increased personalization is breeding a dangerous new creature—Anti-Democratic Man. “Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view,” Pariser notes, “but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles.”  Pariser worries that personalized digital “filters” like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pandora, and Netflix are narrowing our horizons about news and culture and leaving “less room for the chance encounters that bring insights and learning.” “Technology designed to give us more control over our lives is actually taking control away,” he fears.

Pariser joins a growing brigade of Internet pessimists. Almost every year for the past decade a new book has been published warning that the Internet is making us stupid, debasing our culture, or destroying social interaction.  Many of these Net pessimists—whose ranks include Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur), Lee Siegel (Against the Machine), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) and Nicholas Carr (The Shallows)—lament the rise of “The Daily Me,” or the rise of hyper-personalized news, culture, and information. They claim increased information and media customization will lead to close-mindedness, corporate brainwashing, an online echo-chamber, or even the death of deliberative democracy.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written on this topic in recent years, you will not be surprised to hear that I disagree with Pariser and these other Net pessimists when it comes to fears about hyper-personalization and user customization. As I noted in my recent book chapter, ” The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1 – Saving the Net From Its Detractors“:

Their claim that the “Daily Me” and information specialization will lead to a variety of ills is also somewhat overblown.  It’s particularly hard to accept Sunstein and Carr’s claims that increased personalization is breeding “extremism,” “fanaticism” and “radicalization.” A recent study by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business lent credibility to this, finding “no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time” or leading to increased polarization as Sunstein and other pessimists fear. Instead, their findings show that the Net has encouraged more ideological integration and is actually driving us to experience new, unanticipated viewpoints.

While it’s true the Internet has given some extremists a new soapbox to stand on and spew their hatred and stupidity, the fact is that such voices and viewpoints have always existed.  The difference today is that the Internet and digital platforms have given us a platform to counter such societal extremism.  As the old saying goes, the answer to bad speech is more speech—not a crackdown on the underlying technologies used to convey speech.  It should not be forgotten that, throughout history, most extremist, totalitarian movements rose to power by taking over the scarce, centralized media platforms that existed in their countries.  The decentralization of media makes such a take-over far less plausible to imagine. 

The good ol’ days weren’t so great. By most measures we’re more informed and interactive than ever before. Here’s a simple test that works particularly well for anyone over the age of 35: Did you have more serendipitous encounters with alternative viewpoints before or after the rise of the Internet?

The problem with this “eat your greens” approach—besides being somewhat elitist—is that it just isn’t practical. People will continue to want, and get, a more personalized web experience. But that doesn’t mean deliberative democracy is dying. As the existence of MoveOn.org and countless groups like it proves, vigorous debate and political activism have never been stronger.

This is the second of two essays making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom. In my previous essay, which I discussed here yesterday, I examined the first variant of Internet pessimism: “Net Skeptics,” who are pessimistic about the Internet improving the lot of mankind. In this second essay, I take on a very different breed of Net pessimists:  “Net Lovers” who, though they embrace the Net and digital technologies, argue that they are “dying” due to a lack of sufficient care or collective oversight.  In particular, they fear that the “open” Internet and “generative” digital systems are giving way to closed, proprietary systems, typically run by villainous corporations out to erect walled gardens and quash our digital liberties.  Thus, they are pessimistic about the long-term survival of the Internet that we currently know and love.

Leading exponents of this theory include noted cyberlaw scholars Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and Tim Wu.  I argue that these scholars tend to significantly overstate the severity of this problem (the supposed decline of openness or generativity, that is) and seem to have very little faith in the ability of such systems to win out in a free market. Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with a hybrid world in which some “closed” devices and platforms remain (or even thrive) alongside “open” ones. Importantly, “openness” is a highly subjective term, and a constantly evolving one.  And many “open” systems or devices are as perfectly open as these advocates suggest.

Finally, I argue that it’s likely that the “openness” advocated by these advocates will devolve into expanded government control of cyberspace and digital systems than that unregulated systems will become subject to “perfect control” by the private sector, as they fear.  Indeed, the implicit message in the work of all these hyper-pessimistic critics is that markets must be steered in a more sensible direction by those technocratic philosopher kings (although the details of their blueprint for digital salvation are often scarce).   Thus, I conclude that the dour, depressing “the-Net-is-about-to-die” fear that seems to fuel this worldview is almost completely unfounded and should be rejected before serious damage is done to the evolutionary Internet through misguided government action.

I’ve embedded the entire essay down below in Scribd reader, but it can also be found on TechFreedom’s Next Digital Decade book website and SSRN.

The Case for Internet Optimism Part 2 – Saving the Net From Its Supporters (Adam Thierer) http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom.  In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: (1) “Net Skeptics,” who are pessimistic about the Internet improving the lot of mankind; and (2) “Net Lovers,” who appreciate the benefits the Net brings society but who fear those benefits are disappearing, or that the Net or openness are dying.  (Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with these themes since I sketched them out in previous essays here such as, “Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?” and “Two Schools of Internet Pessimism.”) The second essay is here.

This essay focuses on the first variant of Internet pessimism, which is rooted in general skepticism about the supposed benefits of cyberspace, digital technologies, and information abundance. The proponents of this pessimistic view often wax nostalgic about some supposed “good ‘ol days” when life was much better (although they can’t seem to agree when those were). At a minimum, they want us to slow down and think twice about life in the Information Age and how it’s personally affecting each of us.  Occasionally, however, this pessimism borders on neo-Ludditism, with some proponents recommending steps to curtail what they feel is the destructive impact of the Net or digital technologies on culture or the economy.  I identify the leading exponents of this view of Internet pessimism and their major works. I trace their technological pessimism back to Plato but argue that their pessimism is largely unwarranted. Humans are more resilient than pessimists care to admit and we learn how to adapt to technological change and assimilate new tools into our lives over time. Moreover, were we really better off in the scarcity era when we were collectively suffering from information poverty?  Generally speaking, despite the challenges it presents society, information abundance is a better dilemma to be facing than information poverty.  Nonetheless, I argue, we should not underestimate or belittle the disruptive impacts associated with the Information Revolution.  But we need to find ways to better cope with turbulent change in a dynamist fashion instead of attempting to roll back the clock on progress or recapture “the good ‘ol days,” which actually weren’t all that good.

Down below, I have embedded the entire chapter in a Scribd reader, but the essay can also be found on the TechFreedom website for the book as well as on SSRN.  I have also includes two updated tables that appeared in my old “optimists vs. pessimists” essay.  The first lists some of the leading Internet optimists and pessimists and their books. The second table outlines some of the major lines of disagreement between these two camps and I divided those disagreements into (1) Cultural / Social beliefs vs. (2) Economic / Business beliefs.

The Case for Internet Optimism Part 1 – Saving the Net From Its Detractors (Adam Thierer) http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

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Wow, what a year for cyberlaw and information technology policy books!  Both in terms of number of titles and the gravity of the books released, 2010 was one of the biggest years of the past decade (perhaps matched only by 2006 or 2008 in terms of significance).  So, here’s my annual list of the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010.

First, however, as is the case each year [see my 2008 & 2009 lists], I need to repeat a few disclaimers.  First, what qualifies as an “important” info-tech policy book is highly subjective, but I would define it as a title that many people — especially scholars in the field — are currently discussing and that we will likely be referencing for many years to come.  But I “weight” books in the sense that narrowly-focused titles lose a few points. For example, books that deal mostly with privacy issues, copyright law, or antitrust policy do not exactly qualify as the same sort of “info-tech policy book” as other titles that offer a broader exploration of policy issues / concerns. For that reason, “big picture” info-tech policy books tend to rank higher on my lists.

The second caveat: Merely because a book appears on my list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything in it. In fact, as was the case in previous years, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the most important books of 2010 and I find that the cyber-libertarianism I subscribe to has very few fans out there.

With those caveats in mind, here are my choices for the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010.

(1) Tim Wu – The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

In The Master Switch, Tim Wu claims that information industries are prone to “cycles” that generally advance from “open” to “closed” and he correctly notes that regulatory capture and bureaucratic mismanagement are major culprits. “Again and again in the histories I have recounted,” he says, “the state has shown itself an inferior arbiter of what is good for the information industries. The federal government’s role in radio and television from the 1920s through the 1960s, for instance, was nothing short of a disgrace… Government’s tendency to protect large market players amounts to an illegitimate complicity … [particularly its] sense of obligation to protect big industries irrespective of their having become uncompetitive.”

Wu is correct. Strangely, however, he never seems to draw any lesson from that “disgrace” and “complicity.” Indeed, sometimes within a line or two of raising such concerns in his book, Wu seems to dismiss those findings entirely and proposes giving the government far more power to play games within the information sector. If Wu believes what he said about the dangers of regulatory capture and bureaucratic bungling, why is he so eager to empower the State to do even more meddling in information technology sectors?

When it comes to solutions, Wu fails to conduct any serious cost-benefit analysis of the trade-offs associated with an aggrandizement of State power in the name of countering the supposed evils of private power. The solutions Wu offers are typically presented as cost-free options. Yet, Prof. Wu’s primary solution, a so-called “Separation Principle,” would have a devastating impact on high-technology innovation and competitiveness. Claiming that information industries are too important to be governed by traditional laws and regulations, Wu advocates a sweeping industrial policy that would separate information industries into three buckets — content, distribution, and devices — and keep them segregated by force of law. Integration and cross-sector arrangements would essentially become illegal in this system of information apartheid.

Mysteriously, Wu is adamant about this not being a regulatory solution, instead preferring to call it a “constitutional” approach. But such semantic sophistry can’t disguise the fact that his regime would be an ambitious industrial policy for America’s information economy. Entire companies and sectors would need to be undone, and all future technological innovation would need to be subjected to regulatory classification proceedings to determine in which bucket they belong.  Ironically, therefore, Wu’s proposed approach would greatly empower the same regulators that he claimed drove previous industries into the ground! They would have even more sway over the future of technological innovation, media policy decisions, and free speech issues. Again, Wu never address the potential downsides or costs of his proposed approach even though we know that, when it comes to regulation, there is no free lunch. Something has to give.

In sum, I believe Wu’s hyper-pessimistic worldview and extreme recommendations are unwarranted and I made my reservations known in a 6-part series of essays about his book.  [See Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.]  Nonetheless, The Master Switch is a profoundly important book that we’ll be debating for many years to come.

Listen to Jerry Brito’s “Surprisingly Free” podcast discussion with Tim Wu here.

(#2) Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants

Kevin Kelly has written a terrifically interesting book that is actually two books in one. The bookends (Parts 1 and 4) are pretty out there. In those portions of the book, Kelly aims to prove that “the technium” – “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” — is a “force” or even a living “organism” that has a “vital spirit” and which “has its own wants” and “a noticeable measure of autonomy.” “The technium is whispering to itself,” he says. At times, Kelly sounds like he’s longing for humanity’s assimilation into the machine or The Matrix. “We can think of technology as our extended body,” he says. He speaks repeatedly of human-machine “symbiosis.” “We are now symbiotic with technology” and, apparently, that symbiotic bonding can get pretty intense as “humans are the reproductive organs of technology.” Sounds a little kinky, but what the hell does that even mean? I think those are the weaker sections of the book. He sounds like one of those enviro-extremists who proselytizes about Gaia theories of Earth as a spirit or deity.

But Kelly redeems himself with eight absolutely stunning chapters in the middle two sections of the book. Gone is most of the Gaia-like talk of the technium as a living organism. Kelly instead focuses on explaining to us in plain terms the progression of technology in our lives and how we’ve come to cope with it. He notes, for example, that “Over the centuries, societies have declared many technologies to be dangerous, economically upsetting, immoral, unwise, or simply too unknown for our good. The remedy to this perceived evil is usually a form of prohibition. The offending innovation may be taxed severely or legislated to narrow purposes or restricted to the outskirts or banned altogether.”

But banning technology never works, he argues, largely because humans adapt and embrace new tools and developments. “[H]istory shows that it is very hard for a society as a whole to say no to technology for very long.” “Prohibitions are in effect postponements” and “wholesale prohibitions simply do not work to eliminate a technology that is considered subversive or morally wrong. Technologies can be postponed but not stopped.”  Importantly, Kelly doesn’t turn a blind eye to the downsides of technology. In fact, he is refreshingly candid about the trade-offs we face. He argues that, “If we examine technologies honestly, each one as its faults as well as its virtues. There are no technologies without vices and none that are neutral. The consequences of a technology expand with its disruptive nature. Powerful technologies will be powerful in both directions – for good and bad. There is no powerfully constructive technology that is not also powerfully destructive in another direction, just as there is no great idea that cannot be greatly perverted for great harm… This should be the first law of technological expectation: The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well.”

Quite right. But then Kelly then goes on to masterfully discuss the dangers of applying the “precautionary principle” to technological advancement. Kelly correctly argues, is that because “every good produces harm somewhere… by the strict logic of an absolute Precautionary Principle no technologies would be permitted.” (p. 247-8) Under such a regime, progress becomes impossible because trade-offs are considered unacceptable. This doesn’t mean humans shouldn’t try to foresee problems associated with new technologies or address them preemptively. But that can be done without resisting new technologies or technological change altogether. “The proper response to a lousy technology is not to stop technology or to produce no technology,” Kelly argues. “It is to develop a better, more convivial technology.”

In sum, I loved the middle sections of What Technology Wants, but I could have done without the silly “technology-as-organism” theories found in the opening and closing chapters. Overall, however, Kevin Kelly has written a book that demands our attention. We will be talking about What Technology Wants for many, many years to come.

See my complete review of the book here, and make sure to listen to Kelly’s interesting podcast discussion with Jerry Brito here.

(#3) Jaron Lanier – You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget is an intriguing but highly pessimistic look at the impact of the Internet and digital technology on our lives, culture, and economy. Like other Net skeptics, Lanier worries about the loss of individuality, the rise of “mob” behavior, the dangers of free culture, and the rise of a new sharecropper economy in which a small handful of capitalists are supposedly getting rich off the backs of free labor. As a respected Internet visionary, a gifted computer scientist, an expert on virtual reality, and a master wordsmith, the concerns Lanier articulates here deserve to be taken seriously — even if one ultimately does not share his lugubrious worldview. And I don’t.

He rightly castigates extreme varieties of quixotic techno-utopianism, which he labels “cybernetic totalism,” or the belief by some extreme digital age optimists that a “hive mind” or “noosphere” is coming about. It’s a vision of the Net as an organism powered by the wisdom of crowds. Lanier thinks such thinking is all bunk and, worse yet, that it has dangerous ramifications for humanity and individuality. He also asks us to think twice before taking too big of a gulp of the “free culture” kool-aid and extreme varieties of cyber-collectivism, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

But his critique is too sweeping and he refuses at times to acknowledge the many legitimate innovations associated with open source software or Web 2.0 technologies. He also gets so caught up in his critique of the free culture movement that he unfairly indicts the entire digital generation and wrongly claims most modern culture is moribund and little more than “a petty mashup of preweb culture.” Sorry, but I just don’t buy that. And it’s entirely subjective, anyway.

I also found Lanier’s “lords of the cloud” critique of social networking and advertising unpersuasive. Lanier seems to believe that Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 sites are all just part of the hive mind indoctrination scheme. Or, at a minimum, they are turning our brains into Jello, he claims, and destroying our individuality. But here Lanier is guilty of a form of hyper-nostolgia about those mythical “good ‘ol days” when all was supposedly much better. The Web 1.0 world was any better than today’s cyberspace; it had its own share of problems. And today’s leading cloud companies aren’t exploiting us or manipulating our minds by offering us great platforms or free services. Indeed, they are offering us wonderful new avenues for self-expression and interaction with others.

Lanier doesn’t seem willing to leave room for a middle ground position that rejects extreme techno-utopianism and the most extreme elements of the free culture mindset, but which also acknowledges there is much good to be found in modern digital culture and online life. Despite that, his book is easily one of the most important information technology policy books of recent years.

My lengthy review of Lanier’s book is can be found here.

(#4) Nicholas Carr – The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Rich with historical anecdotes and replete with scientific surveys and evidence, The Shallows is a book that demands your respect whether you are comfortable giving it or not. And many people won’t be. After all, Carr is a bit of a skunk at the cyber-garden party. I mean, how dare he suggest that all is not wine and roses with our glorious new world of instantaneous connectivity, abundant information flows, and cheap (often free) media content! Obviously, most of us want to believe that all adds up to a more well-rounded worldview and greater wisdom about the world around us. Carr is skeptical of those claims and The Shallows is his latest effort to poke a hole in the cyber-utopian claims that sometimes pervade discussions about Internet. Although, ultimately, he doesn’t quite convinced me that “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness,” he has made a powerful case that its effects may not be as salubrious as many of us have assumed.

But the ultimate question is: Do the costs really outweigh the benefits? Is it the case that these technologies “turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities — those for reason, perception, memory, emotion”? I think that goes a bit too far. Importantly, Carr doesn’t really ever answer the crucial question: Were we really better off in the decades prior to the rise of the Net? Did we really read more and engage in the more contemplative deep-reading and thinking he Carr fears we are losing because of the Net? Count me among those who think that — whatever most of us are doing in front our our computers most nights, and no matter how distracting it is — it has to be better than much of the junk we wasted our spare time on in the past!

It would have also been nice to have seen Carr offer up some personal suggestions for how we each might better manage cognitive overload, which can be a real problem. In a brief “digression” chapter entitled “On the Writing of This Book,” Carr does mention some of the steps he took personally to make sure he could complete The Shallows without being driven to distraction by the Web and digital technologies. But he doesn’t dwell on that much, which is a shame. A bit of a self-help can go a long way toward alleviating the worst forms of cognitive overload, although it will continue to be a struggle for many of us.

Despite the reservations I raised in my review of the book, Nick Carr’s The Shallows is beautifully written and will be required reading in this field for many years to come.   And make sure to check out this “Surprisingly Free” podcast conversation that Jerry Brito had with Carr back in June.

(#5) Clay Shirky – Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

If you are an avid reader of everything Clay Skirky pens, then the chapters you’ll find in his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age, will seem quite familiar.  We’ve seen or heard most of the material in Cognitive Surplus many times before and I think we got the point: The Internet and digital technology has freed up an enormous amount of time for more productive / worthwhile endeavors that was previously squandered — most by too much coach potato television consumption. He spells out his thesis a bit more eloquently on pg. 63:

The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes. The raw material of this change is the free time available to us, time we can commit to projects that range from the amusing to the culturally transformative. […] Flexible, cheap, and inclusive media now offers us opportunities to do all sorts of things we once didn’t do. In the world of “the media,” we were like children, sitting quietly at the edge of a circle and consuming whatever the grown-ups in the center of the circle produced. That has given way to a world in which most forms of communication, public and private, are available to everyone in some form. (p. 63)

Shirky spends 200+ pages here trying to bolster that claim in various ways. But, again, I’m not sure he needed to. The notion that the Net has made us and our culture better off seems fairly uncontroversial to most of us. But Shirky also overplays his hand at times and tries to read a bit too much into the significance of the rising cognitive surplus.  It’s less likely to reshape politics or civic spirit, for example, as much as he seems to suggest.

My longer review of Cognitive Surplus can be found here and you’ll want to listen to Jerry Brito’s very interesting “Surprisingly Free” podcast discussion with him here.

(#6) Barbara van Schewick – Internet Architecture and Innovation

Barbara van Schewick’s book is an extended — and I do mean extended — love letter to the “end-to-end” principle and Net neutrality.  Weighing in at almost 600 pages, van Schewick goes on much longer than she needed to make her core argument: The structure of the current Internet is sacrosanct and must be preserved. Deviations from end-to-end or “neutrality,” however defined, are to be discouraged or disallowed. “[D]ifferent ways of structuring the Internet result in very different environments for its development,” she argues.  “If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change  the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them, but not necessarily for the rest of us,” she says. (p. 377)

Of course, we’ve heard all these arguments made ad nauseam in the Net neutrality wars, but to her credit, van Schewick makes them far more eloquently in this book than they have ever been made before.  She does a particularly good job of walking the reader through the guts of the Internet’s current architecture.  The layman will find the book quite challenging in light of its highly technical nature, however.  But her grasp of the subject is impressive.

Unfortunately, van Schewick doesn’t spend much time addressing the downsides associated with expanding regulation of the Internet.  There’s no acknowledgment of the danger of regulatory capture, regulatory creep, or bureaucratic meddling with highly complex systems.  She seems to assume regulators will be immune to such tendencies and, more surprisingly, have a crystal ball with which they can view the wisdom of current regulatory actions. She argues, for example, that in some cases “regulators will need to shape the technology before it is deployed.” (p. 388)  This suggests a return to the sort of anticipatory, “Mother, May I” regulatory regime America began turning away from following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  Do we really want the FCC micro-managing every important innovation and business decision in these fast-moving, complex markets?   Experimentation with different digital architectures would essentially become verboten under van Schewick’s paradigm.

When it comes imposing “an engineering design principle” from above, van Schewick claims that “the broad version [of the end-to-end principle] provides much more flexibility for the evolution of the network’s core than is often assumed.” (p. 389)  Yet, she never spells out what she means by that and how much flexibility she would allow in terms of core innovation before having regulators intervene.  For those of us who favor a more dynamic, experimental, and evolutionary approach to markets and technical engineering determinations, van Schewick’s approach looks like one that would freeze current high-tech markets and networks in stone.   Her occasional lip-service to the trade-offs involved in this process are appreciated but, ultimately, unbelievable since she always comes down in favor of maximizing opportunities or innovation at the edge of networks relative to the core. Innovation at the core of networks is every bit as important as innovation at the edge, however. We don’t want stagnation at the core of networks or else the applications that ride on them will suffer.

(#7) Milton Mueller — Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance

Milton Mueller’s Networks and States isn’t the most important information technology policy book of the year, but it was easily my favorite.   Mueller’s book continues his exploration of the forces shaping Internet policy across the globe. What Mueller is doing in his work in this book and elsewhere is becoming the early chronicler of the unfolding Internet governance scene. He meticulously reports on, and then deconstructs, ongoing governance developments along the cyber-frontier. He is, in effect, a sort of de Tocqueville for cyberspace; an outsider looking in and asking questions about what makes this new world tick. Fifty years from now, when historians look back on the opening era of Internet governance squabbles, Milton Mueller’s work will be among the first things they consult.

Mueller’s goal in Networks and States is two-fold and has both an empirical and normative element. First, he aims to extend his exploration of the actors and forces affecting Internet governance debates and then develop a framework and taxonomy to better map and understand these forces and actors. He does a wonderful job on that front, even though many Net governance issues can be incredibly boring. Mueller finds a way to make them far more interesting, especially by helping to familiarize the reader with the personalities and organizations that increasingly dominate these debates and the issues and principles that drive their actions or activism.

Mueller’s second goal in Networks and States is to breathe new life into the old cyber-libertarian philosophy that was more prevalent during the Net’s founding era but has lost favor today. Mueller says his “normative stance is rooted in the Internet’s early promise of unfettered and borderless global communication, and its largely accidental and temporary escape from traditional institutional mechanisms of control.” Mueller makes a convincing case for giving cyber-libertarianism, or what he calls “denationalized liberalism,” another chance; a chance that it really never had. “At its core,” Mueller continues, “denationalized liberalism favors a universal right to receive and impart information regardless of frontiers, and sees freedom to communicate and exchange information as fundamental and primary elements of human choice and political and social activity.” Moreover, “this ideology holds a presumption in favor of networked, associative relations over hierarchical relations as a mode of transnational governance,” he argues. “Governance should emerge primarily as a byproduct of many unilateral and bilateral decisions by its members to exchange or negotiate with other members (or refuse to do so).” Finally, he says, “a denationalized liberalism strives to make Internet users and suppliers an autonomous, global polity.” In essence, it’s about free will, freedom of action, and freedom of association. It’s essentially classical liberalism for the Information Age. Mueller admits that “such an ideology needs to answer tough questions about when hierarchical exercises of power are justified and through which instruments they are exercised.” But he continues on to make the case for “question[ing] the scope of national sovereignty over communications.” “The governance of the Internet needs to explicitly recognize and embrace the principle that there are limits to national sovereignty over the flow of information,” he says.

Mueller has made a beautiful case for cyber-libertarianism and he has given the movement its marching orders: “In short, we need to find ways to translate classical liberal rights and freedom into a governance framework suitable for the global Internet. There can be no cyberliberty without a political movement to define, defend, and institutionalize individual rights and freedoms on a transnational scale.”   Even if you aren’t compelled to join the cause, however, I highly recommend you pick up Mueller’s Network and States, anyway. It’s a terrific survey of the current state of Internet governance and an important work of political science since it offers us a useful spectrum of Net governance viewpoints.

My longer review of Networks and States is here and here’s Jerry Brito’s podcast discussion with Mueller about his book.

(#8) Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (eds.) – Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace

Smartly organized and edited, Access Controlled is essential reading for anyone interested in studying the methods governments are using globally to stifle online expression and dissent. There is simply no other resource out there like this; it should be required reading in every cyberlaw or information policy program.

The book, which is a project of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), is divided into two parts. Part 1 of the book includes six chapters on “Theory and Analysis.” They are terrifically informative essays. The beefy second part of the book provides a whopping 480 pages of detailed regional and country-by-country overviews of the global state of online speech controls and discuss the long-term ramifications of increasing government meddling with online networks.

The book also offers a useful taxonomy to illustrate the three general types of speech and information controls that states are deploying today. Throughout the book, various authors document the increasing movement away from “first generation controls,” which are epitomized by “Great Firewall of China”-like filtering methods, and toward second- and third-generation controls, which are more refined and difficult to monitor.

The individual authors seem to adopt a somewhat gloomy outlook toward the long-term prospects for “technologies of freedom” relative to “technologies of control.” But I think it’s vital to put things in some historical context in this regard. It’s important to recall that, as a communications medium, the Net is still quite young. So, is the Net really more susceptible to State control and manipulation than previous communications technologies and platforms? I’m not so sure, although it’s hard to find a metric to compare them in an analytically rigorous fashion. It’s certainly true that the State has access to more data about its citizens than in the past, but it’s also true that we have more information about the State than ever before, too! And, again, we also have access to more of those technologies of freedom than ever before to at least try to fight back. Compare, for example, the plight of a dissident in a Cold War-era Eastern Bloc communist state to a dissident in China or Iran today. Which one had a better chance of getting their words (or audio and video) out to the local or global community?  And what do the recent Wikileaks episodes teach us in this regard?

Despite those small quibbles, Access Controlled is an indispensable resource that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who covers information technology policy and wants to better understand global Internet regulation.  Very highly recommended.  My complete review of the book is here.

(#9) Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake – Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

Clarke and Knake’s book is important if for no other reason than, as they note, “there are few books on cyber war.” Thus, their treatment of the issue will likely remain the most relevant text in the field for some time to come. They define cyber war as “actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption” and they argue that such actions are on the rise. And they also claim that the U.S. has the most to lose if and when a major cyber war breaks out, since we are now so utterly dependent upon digital technologies and networks.

At their best, Clarke and Knake walk the reader through the mechanics of cyber war, who some of the key players and countries are who could engage in it, and identify what the costs of such of war would entail. Other times, however, the book suffers from a somewhat hysterical tone, as the authors are out here not just to describe cyber war, but to also issue a clarion call for regulatory action to combat it. A bigger problem with the book is the complete lack of reference material, footnotes, or even an index. If you’re going to go around sounding like a couple of cyber-Jeremiahs, you really should include some reference material to back up your gloomy assertions of impending doom.

The authors go after ISPs and many other companies for supposedly not caring about cyber-security. In reality, those companies have powerful incentives to make sure their networks are relatively safe and secure to avoid costly attacks and retain customers who demand their online information and activities be trouble-free. And most ISPs take steps not just to guard against malware and other types of cyber attacks, but they also offer customers free (or cheap) security software as part of a growing suite of gratis services (anti-virus, parental controls, e-mail, etc).

Clarke and Knake would like to see government impose a fairly sweeping set of new rules on ISPs to better secure their networks against potential attacks. In true deputize-the-middleman fashion, they want ISPs to engage in a great deal more network monitoring (using deep-packet inspection techniques) under threat of legal sanction if things go wrong. They admit there are corresponding costs and privacy concerns, but largely dismiss them and essentially ask us to just get over those concerns in the name of a safer and more secure cyberspace. They do, however, say they would be willing to have a “Privacy and Civil Liberties Board” appointed “to ensure that neither the ISPs nor the government was illegal spying on us.” I doubt that will soothe the fears of those who (like me) are fundamentally suspicious of government snooping.

Overall, Clarke and Knake have written a book that is worth reading, but suffers from hyperbolic rhetoric and a serious lack of documentation. Readers should also seek out other perspectives on cyber-security issues, which take a more reasoned approach to the issue.   Read my longer review of Cyber War here.

(#10) Adrian Johns – Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

I can’t remember the last time I read a book that qualified as a “magisterial treatment” of an issue (I suppose it would be Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change), but Johns’ book on piracy certainly qualifies as one.  As the subtitle makes clear, it’s a sweeping 400+ year history of the intellectual property wars.

This mammoth tome was a real struggle to finish since Johns leaves no stone unturned in his exhaustive overview of the history of intellectual property and piracy.  I read it over the course of 6 months because it felt like I was running a marathon to get through each chapter. I needed a big break between each one.  So, pick it up and get ready to pace yourself for the long slog through this important book.  And don’t jump ahead!   Some of the most interesting stories are from the early battles about the very concept of copyright and intellectual property.  I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the early American experience, which began with widespread piracy of English works as a method of undermining the tyranny of the Crown. (Reminded me of how we still screw Cuba by denying trademarks in their cigars just to stick it to Castro).

Johns offers a fairly objective narrative throughout the first 500 pages, but toward the end his own views start to emerge:

“[Enforcement] issues, it seems, have dogged intellectual property policing throughout its history, because of he nature of the enterprise.  They continue to do so today in new forms and media.  Large-scale, intensive, and internationally coordinated antipirate enforcement is sometimes justifies–the effort against counterfeit medicines is a relatively clear example–but in other cases the public good is not so evident.” (p. 507-508)

He goes on to suggest that IP may need to be rethought given new realities. “Intellectual property being a relatively recent concept, it ought to be possible to conceive of an alternative to it that suited the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth,” he argues.  (p. 515)  Yet, the only alternatives he suggest — prizes, subsidies, compulsory licenses — are decidedly nineteenth century in nature.  That leaves him with few other options other than to suggest that the entire concept of IP should potentially be rethought, or that it may perhaps be fading anyhow in light of recent development in the information age, anyway.  IP defenders, however, should not let that discourage them from reading this book. It’s an insightful, interesting, one-of-a-kind history of this contentious subject.

(Listen to Jerry Brito’s “Surprising Free” podcast discussion with Adrian Johns here.)

Honorable Mentions:

* Rob Frieden – Winning the Silicon Sweepstakes: Can the United States Compete in Global Telecommunications?

Frieden’s book argues America has lost its edge in the global telecommunications and broadband race and that government must intervene to set us back on the right course.  What’s the proper course?  He suggest it’s the forced access infrastructural-sharing regime for communications and broadband networks that existed for several years following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  (UNE-P, TELRIC, line-sharing, etc) That regime was largely abandoned, however, after it became evident to most market analysts and economists that, despite the best of intentions, infrastructure-sharing did little to promote investment and innovation.

Frieden suggests all that legal and economic thinking was flawed and that we should go ‘back to the future’ with telecom / broadband policy.  I’m not buying it for one minute, but if you’re looking for a blueprint for resurrecting yesterday’s regulatory regime, this book is it.

Here’s a conversation Jerry Brito had with Rob Frieden on his podcast back in March.

* Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma (eds.) – Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice

Open Government is a terrific collection of 34 essays covering the full gamut of transparency and “Government 2.0″ issues.  The collection was published by O’Reilly Media and Tim O’Reilly himself has one of the best chapters in the book on “Government as a Platform.” “The magic of open data is that the same openness that enables transparency also enables innovation, as developers build applications that reuse government data in unexpected ways.” (p. 25) This explains why in their chapter on “Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement,” David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Edward W. Felten, of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, speak of “a new baseline assumption about the public response to government data: when government puts data online, someone, somewhere will do something valuable and innovative with it.” (p.84) “By publishing its data in a form that is free, open, and reusable,” they continue, “government will empower citizens to dream up and implement their own innovative ideas of how to best connect with their governments.” (p. 89)  The book also includes a terrific chapters by my TLF colleagues Jim Harper and Jerry Brito.  This is an indispensable resource for your bookshelf. Pick it up.

* William Powers – Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

Powers is a gifted storyteller and his walk though the history of philosophy and technology makes this slender volume an enjoyable, quick read. He begins by reminding us that “whenever new devices have emerged, they’ve presented the kinds of challenges we face today — busyness, information overload, that sense of life being out of control. These challenges were as real two millennia ago as they are today, and throughout history, people have been grappling with them and looking for creative ways to manage life in the crowd.”

His key insight is that is that humans can adapt new technology, but it takes time, patience, humility, and a little effort. “The key is to strike a balance,” he says, between “the call of the crowd” and the “need for time and space apart” from it. The problem we face today is that all the pressure is on us to be what he calls “Digital Maximalists.” That is, many of us are increasingly out to maximize the time spent in front of various digital “screens” whether we have made the determination that is really in our best interest or not. It has just gradually happened, Powers argues, because “The goal is no longer to be ‘in touch’ but to erase the possibility of ever being out of touch.”

Even though Powers clearly leans more toward the techno-pessimist camp, what I like best about his book is that he generally avoids a preachy tone and excessive hand-wringing. He isn’t one of those pessimists who adopts a holy-than-thou, the-rest-of-you-just-don’t-get-it attitude. In fact, there’s a great deal of self-deprecating humor in the book as Powers explains how he is struggling with the same issues the rest of us are and trying to figure out how to strike the right balance in his own life. Importantly, he notes that each of us will strike that balance differently. “[E]veryone has to work that out for himself. We’re all different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all way to balance the outward life and the inward one.” That is a crucial insight. There’s nothing worse than a techno-skeptic who tells us they have discovered the one true path to enlightenment or happiness — especially when it entails giving up new technologies that can have so many beneficial upsides. Indeed, Powers argues that “It’s never a good idea to buy into the dark fears of the techno-Cassandras, who generally turn out to be wrong. Human beings are skillful at figuring out the best uses of new tools. However, it can take awhile.”

Indeed, the struggle with information clutter will continue. Assimilating new communications and entertainment technologies into our lives has always been challenging, but, thanks to excellent advice like that offer by William Powers in Hamlet’s BlackBerry, I am optimistic that we humans can do so sensibly and be happier — and wiser — for it in the long-run.

Here’s my complete review of Hamlet’s Blackberry and make sure to listen to Jerry Brito’s discussion with Powers here.

• Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols – The Death and Life of American Journalism

If my list was of the most important media policy books of the year, McChesney and Nichols’ book would be a shoo-in for the top spot. It’s easily the most significant text on media policy in the past few years.  It’s also the most horrifying.  In their world of “post-corporate” newsrooms, the State serves as the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate.  Billions would flow from bureaucracies to media entities and individual journalists in the name of sustaining a “free press.” And this new media welfare state is funded by steep taxes on our mobile phones, broadband connections, and digital gadgets. McChesney and Nichols model their $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era. Their media WPA would include a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists, a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer support to struggling media entities, a significant expansion of postal subsidies, a massive new subsidy for journalism schools, corporate welfare for newspapers sufficient to pay 50 percent of the salaries of all “journalistic employees,” and more. It’s a veritable industrial policy for the press that resembles a Soviet-style five-year plan.

Who pays the bill and how much will the takeover cost? McChesney and Nichols take a remarkably cavalier attitude about it: “The money must be spent and we will worry about where it comes from later.” Such “we’re-all-dead-in-the-long-run” reasoning seems to be the dominant philosophy in Washington policy circles these days. But the estimated $35 billion annual price tag for a “public works” program for the press should give us pause. Moreover, like every other corporate-welfare program (think agriculture subsidies), a journalistic welfare state would no doubt grow in scope and cost over time.

McChesney and Nichols suggest several potential funding sources for the program, many of which would end up burdening commercial media providers in order to subsidize their noncommercial/public media competitors. They advocate a four-part tax plan that would include: a 5 percent tax on new purchases of consumer electronics, which they estimate would bring in $4 billion a year; a 3 percent tax on monthly ISP & mobile-service bills (estimated at $6 billion a year); a 2 percent sales tax on advertising (estimated at $5 to $6 billion a year); and a 7 percent tax on broadcasters’ spectrum licenses (estimated to sap another $3-6 billion a year from an already reeling industry). In other words, they would tax every device and network in your house to transfer money to the federal government to set up a journalistic welfare state.

What McChesney and Nichols essentially advocate is a radical form of media redistributionism — with struggling private entities and others forced to the fund public or non-commercial media outlets they desire. That is, what they seek is not so much a bailout for the familiar private media that has served America so well for two centuries, but rather a massive wealth transfer from one class of media to another, with the stipulation — which they repeat numerous times in the book — that state-subsidized entities are to forgo private advertising revenues, copyright protection, and any affiliation with corporate parents. These restrictions are an essential part of their push for a “post-corporate,” government-controlled press. Indeed, it would virtually make such a press a self-fulfilling prophecy, since copyright laws and advertising have been core ingredients of a successful private media system in the U.S. They’re also why we haven’t had to resort to massive public subsidies for media, as many other nations have.

The Death and Life of American Journalism is a troubling book, but I will give it this: For those of us who still care about our fundamental First Amendment freedoms and a truly free and independent press, McChesney & Nichols’ book clearly draws the battle lines for the future of media and provides a fresh reminder about what it is we’re fighting for.

My longer review of this troubling book can be found here.

Couple of others…

• Nick Bilton –  I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works. I didn’t have a chance to formally review Bilton’s interesting book, but make sure to listen to Bilton’s appearance on the “Surprisingly Free” podcast here.
• Lee Bollinger – Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-open: A Free Press for a New Century I had a very hard time taking this book seriously since Bollinger proposes the creation of a massive U.S. propaganda machine.  Bollinger doesn’t just want our government to help out a bit at the margins like it currently does; he wants the State to get under the covers, cuddle tight and become intimate lovers with the Press.  And then he wants the Big Press to project itself more, especially overseas, to compete with other State-owned or subsidized media enterprises.  It’s almost as disturbing as the McChesney and Nichols book referenced above.  Read my short review of Bollinger’s book here.

Let me know what I’ve missed and tell me what you think is the most important info-tech book of 2010!

Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, will be released next week and it promises to make quite a splash in cyberlaw circles.  It will almost certainly go down as one of the most important info-tech policy books of 2010 and will probably win the top slot in my next end-of-year list.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I agree with everything in it.  In fact, I disagree vehemently with Wu’s general worldview and recommendations, and even much of his retelling of the history of information sectors and policy.  Nonetheless, for reasons I will discuss in this first of many critiques, the book’s impact will be significant because Wu is a rock star in this academic arena as well as a committed activist in his role as chair of the radical regulatory activist group, Free Press. Through his work at Free Press as well as the New America Foundation, Professor Wu is attempting to craft a plan of action to reshape the Internet and cyberspace.

I stand in opposition to almost everything that Wu and those groups stand for, thus, I will be spending quite a bit of time addressing his perspectives and proposals here in coming months, just as I did when Jonathan Zittrain’s hugely important The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It was released two years ago (my first review is here and my latest critique is here).  In today’s essay, I’ll provide a general overview and foreshadow my critiques to come.  (Note: Tim was kind enough to have his publisher send me an advance uncorrected proof of the book a few months ago, so I’ll be using that version to construct these critiques. Please consult the final version for cited material and page numbers.)

The Master Switch & the Cyber-Collectivist Trilogy of Terror

As I noted in my essay on “Two Schools of Internet Pessimism,” what I find most lamentable about the state of cyberlaw and high-tech policy debates today is the foreboding sense of gloom and doom that haunts so many narratives.  To crack open most Net policy books these days is to step into a world of corporate conspiracies, nefarious industry schemers, closed systems, “kill switches,” squashed consumer rights, and so on.  Let’s face it, Chicken Little doesn’t need an agent; pessimism sells. The world loves a good tale of villainy and misery, and that’s exactly what Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu delivers in his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.

Wu’s book is important if for no other reason than he is considered one of the intellectual godfathers of modern cyberlaw and The Master Switch is best understood as the final installment in an important trilogy that began with the publication of Lawrence Lessig’s seminal 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and then was continued on in Jonathan Zittrain’s much-discussed 2008 book, The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It.

To better understand where Wu wants to take us in The Master Switch, we must first return to the central tenant of Lessig’s Code:  “Left to itself,” Lessig predicted, “cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.” (pg 5-6)  Code quickly became a sort of cyber-collectivist Bible and today Lessig’s many disciples in academia and a wide variety of public policy regulatory advocacy organizations continue to preach this gloomy gospel of impending digital doom and “perfect control.”  Zittrain and Wu are Lessig’s most notable intellectual descendants; the Peter and Paul of the Church of Cyber-Doom that he founded.  And despite their insistence that they really aren’t all that pessimistic—or, more humorously, that they are actually libertarians in disguise—this crew persists with frightful tales and lugubrious warnings that unless someone or something—quite often, the State—intervenes to set us on a better course or protect those things that they regard as sacred.

Zittrain’s Future of the Internet, for example, brought Lessig’s Code up date by giving us a fresh set of villains.  Gone was Lessig’s old foil AOL and its worrisome walled gardens. Instead, the new face of evil became Apple, Facebook, and TiVo.  Zittrain worries about “sterile and tethered” digital “appliances” that foreclose digital generativity and the rise of “a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code.”

Wu simply extends this narrative in The Master Switch when he ominously warns that there are “forces threatening the Internet as we know it” (p. 7) and then goes on to craft an enemies list that reads like a “Who’s Who” of high-tech corporate America. No one, it seems, can be trusted—at least not if that someone has a “.com” behind their name.  Wu hopes to convince us that history proves that concentrations of private power in information industries are inevitably follow a period of openness and competition.  He refers to this as “The Cycle.” Thus, he trots out the old collectivist saw that freedom is really slavery — slavery to The Man:

If the stories in this book tell us anything… it is that the free market can also lead to situations of reduced freedom. Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains.  Paradoxically, it sometimes happens that the only way to preserve freedom is through judicious controls on the exercise of private power.  If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion. (p. 310)

This is the heart of Wu’s critique in The Master Switch: The real threat is not Big Brother but Big Corporate Brother. It’s certainly not a new critique. Wu is simply steering the Lessig-ite, cyber-collectivism school of cyberlaw in line with traditional “progressive” perspectives and recommendations.  Indeed, although he and other so-called progressives don’t always come right out and say it, they often suggest that private power – however defined – is so insidious and threatening that greatly amplified State power to counter it becomes essential, even a good.

The cyber-collectivist movement that Lessig began with Code and Zittrain and Wu continue in their books, is fueled by that dour, depressing “the-Net-is-about-to-die” fear. Again and again their message comes down to this: “Enjoy the good old days of the open Internet while you can, because any minute now it will be crushed and closed-off by corporate marauders!”  This crowd want us to believe that the corporate big boys are — someday very soon — going to toss the proverbial “master switch,” suffocating Internet innovation and digital freedom, and making us all cyber-slaves within their commercialized walled gardens.

We might think of this fear as “The Great Closing,” or the notion that, unless radical interventions are pursued — usually of a regulatory nature – a veritable Digital Dark Age of Closed Systems will soon unfold, complete with myriad AOL-like walled gardens, “sterile and tethered devices,” corporate censorship, and consumer gouging. Again, it’s really just a restatement of the old Lessig vision of an unfettered cyberspace leading to “perfect (corporate) control.”  In other words, most information systems, networks and devices will be bottled up by corporate “gatekeepers” if markets aren’t steered in a better direction by wise philosopher-regulators.  And these “Openness Evangelicals,” as I will call them, believe they are the sagacious chosen few who will serve as the self-appointed janissary of the supposed dying order of openness.

My critique of this cyber-collectivist thinking and “Great Closing” thesis was more fully developed in these two essays [1, 2] and will be more robustly developed in a chapter for an upcoming book that will be published shortly.  Much of what I’ll have to say in response to Wu’s new book will be drawn from those essays as well as my two-part exchange [1, 2] with Lessig upon the 10^th anniversary of the publication of Code. Basically, I do not buy – not for one minute – the notion that “the Internet is dying” or that “openness” is evaporating.  The Internet has never been more vibrant or open.  Again, please read those previous essays for my completely response.  I’ll be teasing out some of those themes in future essays here.

More specifically, my response to Wu’s new book comes down to this:

1. Rarely is there any discussion of the nature of the respective forms of “power” or the coercive nature of State power, in particular.  The fact that the State has a monopoly on force in society and, thus, can penalize or even imprison, is either ignored or treated as irrelevant compared to the supposed “power” of private actors.
2. Rarely in their analysis — and never in Wu’s book — is there a serious cost-benefit analysis of the trade-off associated with an aggrandizement of State power in the name of countering the supposed evils of private power.  The solutions offered – to the extent they rise above amorphous calls to “do something” – are presented as cost-free options.
3. There isn’t enough focus on the dangers of “regulatory capture” or the massive inefficiencies associated with the sort of regulatory regimes that progressives and modern cyber-collectivists like Wu would substitute for market mechanisms.

In my next installment, I’ll take on Wu’s critique of the fictional “purely economic laissez-faire approach” he derides – an approach that has never existed in American communications or media markets.  In a forthcoming installment, I’ll also be challenging Tim to a Simon-Ehrlich wager on this front and ask him to put his money where his mouth is to see just how serious he is about his dour worldview and extreme technological pessimism!  So, stay tuned.

[Jump to Part 2 in the series.]

TLF readers will definitely want to check out the online symposium underway over at the Concurring Opinions blog debating the thesis set forth in Jonathan Zittrain’s important 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. The symposium will feature a terrific cast of thinkers, including: Steven Bellovin, Ryan Calo, Laura DeNardis, James Grimmelmann, Orin Kerr, Lawrence Lessig, Harry Lewis,Daithí Mac Síthigh, Betsy Masiello, Salil Mehra, Quinn Norton, Alejandro Pisanty, Joel Reidenberg, Barbara van Schewick and me!  Regular contributors to the Concurring Opinions blog, such as Frank Pasquale, are also taking part.

Faithful readers will recall that I named Zittrain’s book the most important Internet policy book of 2008 and one of the most important books of the past decade.  It’s impact has already been enormous. But I’ve also been unrelenting in my criticism of the book and Zittrain’s dour forecast for the future of Internet “openness” and digital “generativity.” Down below I have reproduced my contribution to the Concurring Opinions symposium, but I encourage you to hop over there to check out all the essays that are pouring in on this topic.

In his opening essay in this symposium, Jonathan Zittrain ensures us that he is “not exactly a pessimist.” “I recognize, and celebrate,” he says, “the fact that the digital environment of 2010 is the coolest, most interesting, most option-filled it’s ever been.” Terrific! I am glad to hear that because the crux of my repeated critiques of his book, The Future of the Internet, over the past two years has been focused on its unrelenting – and largely unwarranted – pessimism about our possible cyber-futures. Alas, his essay on these pages still displays much of that underlying techno-pessimism and begs me to ask: Will the real Jonathan Zittrain please stand up?

Regardless of whether Zittrain is more optimistic now than when he penned his book two years ago, others are seemingly taking its pessimist message to heart. Indeed, “the Death of the Internet” is a hot meme in the Internet policy world these days. Much as a famous 1966 cover of Time magazine asked “Is God Dead?” Wired magazine, the magazine for the modern digerati, proclaimed in a recent cover story that “The Web is Dead.” And just this past week, The Economist magazine ran a cover story fretting about “The Web’s New Walls,” wondering “how the threats to the Internet’s openness can be averted.” Like Zittrain’s book, the primary fear expressed in both essays was that the wide-open Internet experience of the past decade is giving way to a new regime of corporate control and walled gardens.

Before addressing this concern in more detail, let’s consider the origins of Zittrain’s pessimism. Zittrain’s Future of the Internet, as well as Tim Wu’s soon-to-be-released The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, might best be understood as the second and third installments in a trilogy that began with the publication of Lawrence Lessig’s seminal 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

Lessig’s book gave birth to cyberlaw and the study of Internet policy as we all know and discuss it today. More important, from my perspective, is that Code spawned a bona fide philosophical movement within those circles. Code was both a polemic against both cyber-libertarianism and Internet exceptionalism as well as a sort of call-to-arms for a new Net activist movement. The book gave this movement its central operating principle: Code and cyberspace can be bent to the will of the collective, and it often must be if we are to avoid any number of impending disasters brought on by nefarious-minded (or just plain incompetent) folks in corporate America.

It’s hard to know what to label this school of thinking, and Prof. Lessig has taken offense at my calling it “cyber-collectivism.” But the collectivism of which I speak is a more generic type, not the hard-edged Marxist brand of collectivism of modern times. Instead, it’s the belief that markets, property rights, and private decision-making about the future course of the Net must yield to supposedly more enlightened top-down actors and mechanisms. Their central rallying cry – to the extent it can be boiled down to a single term – is “openness!” “Openness” is almost always treated as The Good; anything that is “closed” (or proprietary) in nature is treated as The Bad.

My primary beef with these “Openness Evangelicals” is not that openness isn’t a fine generic principle around which to organize cyberspace. It’s that (a) I‘m more willing to allow evolutionary dynamism to run its course within digital markets, even if that means some “closed” devices and platforms remain (or even thrive); and, (b) the “openness” they advocate inevitably devolves into expanded government control of cyberspace.

My other problem with this movement, and Zittrain’s book in particular, comes down to that dour, depressing “the-Net-is-about-to-die” fear that seems to fuel this worldview. The message seems to be: “Enjoy the good old days of the open Internet while you can, because any minute now it will be crushed and closed-off by corporate marauders!” The Openness Evangelicals want us to believe that the corporate big boys are — someday very soon — going to toss the proverbial “master switch,” suffocating Internet innovation and digital freedom, and making us all cyber-slaves within their commercialized walled gardens.

We might think of this fear as “The Great Closing,” or the notion that, unless radical interventions are pursued – usually of a regulatory nature – a Digital Dark Age of Closed Systems will soon unfold, complete with myriad AOL-like walled gardens, “sterile and tethered devices,” corporate censorship, and consumer gouging. Again, it’s really just a restatement of the old Lessig view that “Left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.” In other words, most information systems, networks and devices will be bottled up by corporate “gatekeepers” if markets aren’t steered in a better direction by wise philosopher-regulators.

But there are serious problems with “The Great Closing” thesis as set forth in the work of Lessig, Zittrain, and Wu:

1)
There isn’t a clear definition of “open” vs. “closed” systems, and there never will be, and supposedly “closed” networks or “sterile” devices aren’t nearly as closed or sterile as critics claim. Zittrain praises the supposedly more “open” nature of PCs and praises the openness to innovation that Microsoft’s Windows operating system offers in particular, but others have blasted Windows for years as the Great Satan of closed code. Meanwhile, Zittrain makes Steve Jobs and Apple’s iPhone and iPad out to be “sterile,” closed appliances, but the company’s App Store has offered millions of innovators the opportunity to produce almost every conceivable type of mobile application the human mind could imagine. Moreover, those Apple devices don’t block completely “open” communications applications or interfaces, such as web browsers, email and SMS clients, or Twitter. And certainly no one is forced to spend hundreds of dollars on these Apple products. There are many alternatives. It’s never been easier to create or find information or applications on multiple platforms – not just via your PC as Zittrain seems to suggest.

2)
There are powerful counter-incentives that discourage companies from “closing” their systems in ways that would negatively impact consumer welfare. Social and economic influences help ensure the scales won’t be tipped completely in the closed direction. The Web is built on powerful feedback mechanisms and possesses an extraordinary level of transparency in terms of its operations. Moreover, the breaking news cycle for tech developments can be measured in milliseconds. Every boneheaded move is subjected to immediate and intense scrutiny by bloggers, tech press, pundits, gadget sites, etc. Never has the white-hot spotlight of public attention been so intense in terms of helping to shine light on corporate missteps. Reputation is perhaps the greatest asset possessed by any tech company, and they work hard to safeguard it.

3)
Most evidence suggests everything is getting increasingly “open” all the time regardless of what any corporation might want. Most corporate attempts to bottle up information or close-off their systems end badly. The walled gardens of the past failed miserably, for example. In critiquing Zittrain’s book, Ann Bartow has noted that “if Zittrain is correct that CompuServe and AOL exemplify the evils of tethering, it’s pretty clear the market punished those entities pretty harshly without Internet governance-style interventions.” Indeed, let’s not forget that AOL was the big, bad corporate boogeyman of Lessig’s Code and yet, just a decade later, it has been relegated to an also-ran. (Has everyone forgotten the hysteria over AOL-Time Warner merger? Or the fear that AOL would dominate the Instant Messaging world? Someone will need to remind AOL-TW shareholders, who lost hundreds of billions on the deal, what all the fuss was about.) There are few reasons to believe that modern efforts to impose “corporate control” or create walled gardens will end any differently.

4)
The critics greatly overstate the case regarding the supposed evils of closed systems, anyway. They fail to appreciate how there was a need/demand for some closed or “sterile” devices. Why shouldn’t people who want a simpler or more secure digital experience have such options? Zittrain seems to fear that the devices of the hoi polloi will drive out those favored by tinker-happy tech geeks (of which I count myself a proud member). But we need not fear such foreclosure for the reasons I discuss next.

5)
Innovation continues rapidly in both directions along the “open” vs. “closed” continuum. The presence of “closed” systems or devices on the market doesn’t mean innovation has been foreclosed among more “open” systems or platforms. In other words, a hybrid future is both desirable and possible. We can have the best of both worlds: a world full of some closed systems or even “tethered appliances,” but also plenty of generativity and openness. Think iPhone vs. Android vs. Windows Mobile vs. the many other mobile operating systems. Some are more closed, others are quite open. Zittrain says Android, which is open source, is “a sort of canary in the coal mine” but ignores the fact that it is growing at a frantic pace, now accounting for one-quarter of mobile web traffic just three years after its inception. Not only does he ignore that fact, but Zittrain then reverts to the “kill switch” boogeyman and warns us that any day now Google could change its mind, close the platform, and “kill an app, or the entire phone” remotely. But where’s the business sense in that? What’s the incentive for companies to pursue such a diabolical course of action? Is Google going to start making all those millions of apps on their own which independents developers produce today? It seems unlikely and unpopular, and can you imagine the lawsuits that would fly if they did try it! Meanwhile, how many times has Apple thrown the dreaded “kill switch” on apps? There are tens of millions of apps in the App Store and hundreds of billions of downloads. If Steve Jobs is supposed to be the great villain of independent innovation, he seems to be doing a pretty bad job at it! Again, today’s supposed “walled gardens” are less “walled” than ever before.

6) And oh, by the way… the old Internet that Zittrain and others like to wax nostalgic about was never quite as open and generative as they suggest. Let’s face it, the good ol’ days weren’t really so glorious. Seriously, were you online back in 1994? Did you enjoy Trumpet Winsock, noisy 14.4 baud modems, and narrowband dial-up? Did you like loading up multiple 5 ¼ floppy disks to get an OS running so that you could even use your machine? Yeah, me neither.

But here’s the other forgotten factor: Until the Net was commercialized during that period, it had been an extremely closed system. As Geert Lovink reminds us, “The first decades the Internet was a closed world, only accessible to (Western) academics and the U.S. military. In order to access the Internet one had to be an academic computer scientist or a physicist. Until the early nineties it was not possible for ordinary citizens, artists, business or activists, in the USA or elsewhere, to obtain an email address and make use of the rudimentary UNIX-based applications. [..] It was a network of networks — but still a closed one.” Moreover, it was only because Lessig and Zittrain’s much-dreaded AOL and CompuServe came along that many folks were even able to experience and enjoy this strange new place called cyber-space. “The fact that millions of Americans for the first time experienced the Internet through services like AOL (and continue to do so) is a reality that Zittrain simply overlooks,” notes Lovink. Could it be that those glorious “good ol’ days” Zittrain longs for were really due to the way closed “walled gardens” like AOL and CompuServe held our hands to some extent and gave many folks (not me!) a guided tour of cyberspace? Regardless, we need not revisit that ancient history. Again, those walled gardens came crumbling down.

7) Finally, there’s remarkably little said about possible solutions or an acknowledgment that alternative approaches can have costs or entail significant trade-offs. At the end of the day, when you peel away all the techno-talk and worry-wart hand-wringing, what Zittrain doesn’t seem to like is that some people are making choices that he doesn’t approve of. To be generous, perhaps it’s because he feels that they don’t fully understand the supposed dangers of the choices they are making. But what, exactly, is it that Zittrain wants done, and who or what should make it happen? Remarkably, he doesn’t offer many specifics in his book or in his essay. Should consumers be discouraged from purchasing iPads, video game consoles, or TiVos because they are “too closed”? Or should the creators of such gadgets be forced to “open them up,” even if it means that might discourage their development in the first place? Zittrain really never makes it clear, although he hints that once developers do open their previously closed systems a bit, they should not be allowed to close them back up. But wouldn’t that discourage the developer from opening things up more in the first place? Again, no answer from him.

Regardless, to reiterate and close, my contention here and elsewhere has been: (a) that things just aren’t as bad as Zittrain makes them out to be; (b) that the evolutionary “open vs. closed” process itself has value; and, (c) who is he to say those choices are irrational or that this spontaneous, experimental process should be interrupted? If some mere mortals choose more “closed” devices or platforms, then so what? It isn’t the end of the world. Again, those devices or platforms aren’t really as closed as he suggests – in fact, they are far more open in some ways than the earlier technologies and platforms he glorifies. In sum: We can have the best of both worlds — a world full of plenty of “tethered” appliances, but also plenty of generativity and openness. We need not make a choice between the two, and we certainly shouldn’t be demanding someone else make it for us.

One final point that didn’t really fit anywhere above.. Zittrain worries about “The famously ungovernable Internet suddenly becom[ing] much more governable, an outcome most libertarian types would be concerned about.” He’s referring to a concern addressed in more detail in his book (and Lessig’s Code) that the Net could become more “regulable” because of changes in code and architecture over time. To the extent this is a problem at all – and I have my doubts for the reasons noted above – this is a problem we should handle by putting more constraints on our government(s), not by imposing more regulations on code or coders. Consider privacy and data collection concerns. While, as a general principle, I think it wise for companies to minimize the amount of data they collect about consumers or websurfers, we need not, and ought not, force that by law, given the huge benefits of data collection and use for innovation and, yes, the openness if the Internet ecosystem! We should certainly hold companies to high standards when it comes to data security and breach (including by FTC enforcement). But, again, the way to deal with the “regulability” threat that Lessig and Zittrain raise is to tightly limit the powers of government to access private information through intermediaries in the first place.

[I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I subsequently penned an essay on the subject that generated a fair bit of attention. So, I figured I must be on to something, and the more Net policy books I read, the more I realized that the divisions between these two camps were growing wider and increasingly heated. Thus, I thought I would share this very rough draft (much of it still in outline form) of the opening chapter of that book I want to write about this great intellectual war over the impact of technology on society. I invite reader input. Update Jan. 2011: I finally published a full-length essay on this topic. You can find it here. ]

__________

The impact of technological change on culture, learning, and morality has long been the subject of intense debate, and every technological revolution brings out a fresh crop of both pessimists and pollyannas. Indeed, a familiar cycle has repeat itself throughout history whenever new modes of production (from mechanized agriculture to assembly-line production), means of transportation (water, rail, road, or air), energy production processes (steam, electric, nuclear), medical breakthroughs (vaccination, surgery, cloning), or communications techniques (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) have appeared on the scene.

The cycle goes something like this. A new technology appears. Those who fear the sweeping changes brought about by this technology see a sky that is about to fall. These “techno-pessimists” predict the death of the old order (which, ironically, is often a previous generation’s hotly-debated technology that others wanted slowed or stopped).  Embracing this new technology, they fear, will result in the overthrow of traditions, beliefs, values, institutions, business models, and much else they hold sacred.

The pollyannas, by contrast, look out at the unfolding landscape and see mostly rainbows in the air. Theirs is a rose-colored world in which the technological revolution du jour is seen as improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order.  If something has to give, then the old ways be damned! For such “techno-optimists,” progress means some norms and institutions must adapt—perhaps even disappear—for society to continue its march forward.

Our current Information Revolution is no different. It too has its share of techno-pessimists and techno-optimists. Indeed, before most of us had even heard of the Internet, people were already fighting about it—or at least debating what the rise of the Information Age meant for our culture, society, and economy.

Web 1.0 Fight: Postman vs. Negroponte

In his 1992 anti-technology screed Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the late social critic Neil Postman greeted the unfolding Information Age with a combination of skepticism and scorn.  Indeed, Postman’s book was a near-perfect articulation of the techo-pessimist’s creed.  “Information has become a form of garbage,” he claimed, “not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.”  If left unchecked, Postman argued, America’s new technopoly—“the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology”—would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Postman opened his polemic with the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word.  Postman reminded us how King Thamus responded to the god Theuth, who boasted of how his invention of writing would improve the wisdom and memory of the masses relative to the oral tradition of learning.  King Thamus shot back, “the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.”  King Thamus then passed judgment himself about the impact of writing on society, saying he feared that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

And so Postman—fancying himself a bit of a modern King Thamus—cast judgment on today’s comparable technological advances and those who would glorify them:

we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people Technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future. They are therefore dangerous and to be approached cautiously. … If one is to err, it is better to err on the side of Thamusian skepticism.

Nicholas Negroponte begged to differ. An unapologetic Theuthian technophile, the former director of the MIT Media Lab responded on behalf of the techno-optimists in 1995 with his prescient polemic, Being Digital.  It was a paean to the Information Age, for which he served as one of the first high prophets—with Wired magazine’s back page frequently serving as his pulpit during the many years he served as a regular columnist.

Appropriately enough, the epilogue of Negroponte’s Being Digital was entitled “An Age of Optimism” and, like the rest of the book, it stood in stark contrast to Postman’s pessimistic worldview.  Although Negroponte conceded that technology indeed had a “dark side” in that it could destroy much of the old older, he believed that was inevitable, but also not cause for much concern. “Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped,” he insisted, and we must learn to appreciate the ways “digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.” (This sort of techno-determism is a theme we would see on display in many of the works by other Internet optimists that followed in Negroponte’s footsteps.)

To Postman’s persistent claim that America’s technopoly lacked a moral compass, Negroponte again conceded the point but took the glass-is-half-full view: “Computers are not moral; they cannot resolve complex issues like the rights to life and to death. But being digital, nevertheless, does give much cause for optimism.”  His defense of the digital age rested on the “four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering.” Gazing into his techno-crystal ball in 1995, Negroponte forecast the ways in which those qualities would revolutionize society:

The access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different from the present. The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions. As children appropriate a global information resource, and as they discover that only adults need learner’s permits, we are bound to find new hope and dignity in places where very little existed before.

In many ways, that’s the world we occupy today; a world of unprecedented media abundance and unlimited communications and connectivity opportunities.

But the great debate about the impact of digitization and information abundance would not end with Postman and Negroponte. Theirs would only be Act I in a drama that continues to unfold, and it is growing more heated and complex with each new character that comes on the stage.

Web War II

The disciples of Postman and Negroponte are a colorful, diverse lot. The players in Act II of this drama occupy many diverse professions—journalists, technologists, business consultants, sociologists, economists, lawyers, etc.—and they are disagreeing even more vehemently and vociferously about the impact of the Internet and digital technologies than Postman and Negroponte did.

In Exhibit 1, I have listed the Internet optimists and pessimists and list their key works.

In Exhibit 2, I have sketched out the major lines of disagreement between these two camps and divided those disagreements into (1) Cultural / Social beliefs vs. (2) Economic / Business beliefs.

When you boil it all down, there are two major points of contention between the optimists and pessimists:

1. The impact of technology on learning & culture & the role of experts vs. amateurs in that process.
2. The promise—or perils—of personalization.

The Debate over Learning & Culture

• Internet optimists and pessimists have engaged in heated debates over role of amateur production and benefits of abundant media

• pessimists fear impact of Net and “cult of amateur” on “professional” media

• without “enforceable scarcity” and protection for the “enlightened class,” the pessimists wonder how “high quality” news or “high art” will get funded and disseminated; and they worry about the decline of authority & truth

• optimists argue that new modes of production (namely peer-production) will be an adequate (if not superior) alternative
  • or they believe new business models will evolve to support professional media

• but pessimists argue that all the new choices are largely false choices
  • participatory democracy all bunk (“mob rule” and rumor mill mongering)
  • just more force-fed commercial propaganda; concerns about advertising
  • also worry about “digital sharecropping” where small group of elites make money off backs of free labor

• optimists counter that Web 2.0 offers real choices and voices
  • optimists argue that many (perhaps most) aren’t in it for the money
  • they do it for love of knowledge & “free culture”

• pessimists argue that “free” culture isn’t free at all; often just parasitic copying / piracy
  • could have profound ramifications for future of news, journalism, “high culture”
  • fear loss of trusted intermediaries & authorities
  • could “dumb down” the masses

• the centrality of Wikipedia to the discussion serves as a microcosm of the entire debate
  • does Wikipedia mark the decline of authority?
  • what is “truth,” the pessimists ask? [“truthiness” fear, a la S. Colbert & Manjoo]
  • who and what can be trusted if everyone is considered an authority?
  • on the other hand, what if it works (at least reasonably well)?
  • what does that tell us about peer production / crowdsourcing?

The Debate over the Promise or Perils of Personalization

• both optimists and pessimists agree that Net & Web 2.0 is leading to more “personalized” media experience
  • but they vehemently disagree on whether that is good or bad
  • what will it mean for participatory democracy?

• pessimists fear Negroponte’s “Daily Me” (i.e., hyper-personalization) leads to:
  • homogenization
  • close-mindedness
  • an online echo-chamber
  • overload of choices + just more corporate brainwashing

• optimists counter that personalization leads to:
  • heterogeneity / chance for everyone to be heard
  • openness
  • exposure to new thinking and opinions
  • abundance of choices = diversity of thought / participation
• in the extreme, some pessimists fear the “mechanization of the soul” and the “surrender to the machine”

• while that may sound a bit over the top, it doesn’t help that some optimists speak of the noosphere & “global consciousness” and seem to long for the eventual singularity

Who’s Got It Right?

• On balance, I believe the optimists generally have the better of the argument today
• But pessimists make many fair points that deserve to be taken seriously; they just need a more reasonable articulation of (some of) those concerns
• The better approach is what I call “pragmatic optimism,” which attempts to rid the optimist paradigm of its kookier, pollyannish thinking while also taking into account some of the very legitimate concerns raised by the pessimists, but rejecting its Luddite fringe in the process.

Thoughts on the Pessimists…

• First and foremost, the pessimists need better spokespersons! Or, they at least need a more moderated, less hysterical tone when addressing concerns raised by technological progress (many of which are quite legitimate).

• It’s often difficult to take the pessimists seriously when they persist with their seeming outright hostility to most forms of technological progress / change. Every one of them claim they are not a Luddite, and often I believe them. But the tone of some of their writing, and the thrust of some of their recommendations, have clear Luddite tendencies.

• Moreover, their endless name-calling and derision for the digital generation is, at times, just as insulting and immature as they “mob” they repeatedly castigate in their works. Too often, their criticism devolves into philosophical snobbery and blatant elitism. Constantly looking down their noses at digital natives and all “amateur” production doesn’t help them win any converts.

• It’s quite shocking how the pessimists have almost nothing good to say about Wikipedia and demonize it endlessly. Much the same goes for open source and other collaborative efforts. They don’t appear willing to accept the possibility of any benefits coming from collective efforts. And they wrongly treat the rise of collective / collaborative efforts as a zero-sum game; they seem to imagine it represents a net loss of individual effort & “personhood.” That simply doesn’t follow.

• Most importantly, the pessimists need to come to grips with the Information Revolution and offer more constructive and practical solutions to legitimately difficult transitional problems created by disintermediating influences of the digital technologies and Net.

• The nostalgia the pessimists typically espouse for the past is a common refrain of cultural and technological critics who fear that the “good ‘ol days” are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets are steering us straight into a moral abyss.  The truth typically proves less cataclysmic, of course.  The great thing about humans is that we adapt better than other creatures. When it comes to technological change, resiliency is hard-wired into our genes.  We learn how to use the new tools that are given to us and gradually assimilate them into our lives and culture.  Indeed, we have lived through more radical revolutions than the Information Revolution. We can adapt and learn to live with some of the legitimate difficulties & downsides of the Information Age.

• The pessimists are at their best when highlighting the very legitimate concerns about the challenges that accompany technological change, including the impact of the digital revolution on “professional” media and the decline of authority among trusted experts and intermediaries.
  • we absolutely don’t want to lose all that
  • there are real benefits associated with it
  • and we need to find a way to fund “professional” media / art going forward

• But, practically speaking, what would the pessimists have us do if we can’t mitigate these problems? Would they roll back the clock with burdensome restrictions? As Ben Casnocha noted recently: “the wind at the backs of all techno-optimists … [is] the forward momentum of technological development. You cannot turn back the clock. It is impossible to envision a future where there is less information and fewer people on social networks. It is very possible to envision increasing abundance along with better filters to manage it. The most constructive contributions to the debate, then, heed Moore’s Law in the broadest sense and offer specific suggestions for how to harness the change for the better.”  That’s what many pessimists have failed to do in their works.

Thoughts on the Optimists…

• The optimists currently have the better of the debate as the abundance of Web 2.0 riches is generally benefiting culture / society.

• Relative to the past it is almost impossible to see how one could argue society has not benefited from the Internet and new digital technologies. The Digital Revolution has greatly empowered masses and offered them more informational inputs.

• An age of abundance is certainly preferable to an age of information scarcity!

• But optimists need to be less Pollyanna-ish and avoid becoming the “technopolists”  (or digital utopians) that Postman feared were taking over our society
  • Way too much Rousseauian romanticism at work in some optimist writings. All this talk of the Net “remaking man” or human nature is pure rubbish.
  • Not all change is good change; the optimists need to be mature enough to understand and address the occasional downsides of digital life without dismissing the critics.
  • And they need to acknowledge that sometimes the wisdom of crowds really can = the stupidity of crowds (when does collective intelligence devolve into herd mentality?) And all this crazy talk of “the hive mind” and the “noosphere” must end.  Some of optimists sound like they long for life in The Matrix; bring on the Singularity!  That’s when you know an optimists has crossed over into the realm of quixotic techno-utopianism.

• Optimists often overplay the benefits of collective intelligence, collaboration, and the role of amateur production.  They need to frame Wiki / peer-production models as a complement to professional media, not a replacement for it.
  • Could The New York Times really be cobbled together by amateurs each day?
  • Why aren’t there any really compelling open source video games?
  • There is a big difference between “remix culture” and “rip-off culture”
  • “The Long Tail” is not “the future of all business”; but it is an increasingly important part of it, and it is wonderful that it is so much more accessible than it was in the past.
  • Will we really be better off if all professionals & intermediaries disappear? Optimists play the “old media just don’t get it” card too often and snobbishly dismiss all their concerns and efforts to reinvent themselves

• Optimists need to place technological progress in context and appreciate that, as Postman argued, there are some moral dimensions to technological progress that deserve attention.

• Of course, on the other hand, some of those moral consequences are profoundly positive, which the pessimists usually fail to appreciate or even acknowledge.

Conclusion: Toward “Pragmatic Optimism”

• Generally speaking, I believe the optimists currently have the better of the debate. It is impossible for me to believe that we were better off in an era of information poverty & un-empowered masses.

• But there’s a kernel of truth to what the pessimists predict about how the passing of the old order leaving society without some things that might be worth preserving.  And they are certainly correct that each of us should think about how to better balance new technologies and assimilate them into our lives.

• The sensible middle ground position is “pragmatic optimism”: We should embrace the amazing technological changes at work in today’s Information Age but do so with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change. [See my “Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed” below]

• We need to think about how to mitigate the negative impacts associated with technological change without adopting the paranoid tone or Luddite-ish recommendations of the pessimists.

• And it is important for us to personally exercise some personal restraint in terms of the role technology plays in our life. While pessimists from Plato and Postman certainly went too far, there is a kernel of truth to their claim that, taken to an extreme, technology can have a negative impact on life and learning.  We need to focus on the Aristotelian mean. We must avoid neo-Luddite calls for a return to “the good ‘ol days” on the one hand, while also rejecting techno-utiopian Pollyanna-ism on the other

• Regardless, the old Theuth-Thamus debate about the relationship between technological change and its impact on culture and society will continue to rage. There is no chance this debate will die down anytime soon. And just wait till virtual reality goes mainstream!  Oh brother, now that is going to be a lively debate. I might turn into a Thamusian once I find my son playing a virtual gangster or pimp in “Grand Theft Auto 12: The Immersive Experience.”

• Nonetheless, generally speaking, I remain quite bullish about the prospects for technology to generally improve the human condition.

The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed

by Adam Thierer

I believe that the Internet and digital technologies are reshaping our culture, economy, and society in most ways for the better, but not without some serious heartburn along the way.

I believe that the world of information abundance that has dawned is vastly superior to the world of information poverty that we just left. But I also understand that not all information is equal and that that the rise of abundance raises concerns about information overload, objectionable content, and the role of “authority” and “truth.”

I believe the era of traditional Mass Media is coming to an end, but “professional” media institutions and creators continue to play a vital role in the creation, aggregation, and dissemination of news, information, culture, and entertainment. The Internet, however, will force gut-wrenching changes on traditional media institutions and some of the more traditionally vital ones (ex: daily local newspapers) will struggle to re-invent themselves, or may wither away entirely. And while I believe that “professional” journalism faces very serious challenges from the rise of the Internet and user-generated content, but I also believe that hybrid forms of news-gathering and reporting are offering society exciting new ways to learn about the world around them.

I believe Wikipedia is an amazing example of collection action / intelligence at work, but I also understand it is not without flaws and limitations. I believe Wikipedia is a wonderful complement, but not a complete substitute, for other media and information sources and inputs.

I believe that free and open source software (FOSS) has produced enormous social / economic benefits, but I do not believe that FOSS (or “wiki” models) will replace all proprietary business models or methods.  Each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they will continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.

I believe the Long Tail is a powerful phenomenon, but not “the future of all business.” It is now a more important part of the future of business, but not the entirety of it. But it is wonderful that it is more accessible than ever and that we have found ways to monetize it to benefit less well know creators and innovators.

I believe there is a difference between “remix culture” and “ripoff culture.”  Remix culture generally enhances and extends culture and creativity. Blatant content piracy, on the other hand, can discourage the creative efforts of the citizenry and deprive some of society’s most gifted creators of the incentive to produce culturally beneficial works. Likewise, hacking, circumvention, and reverse-engineering all play an important and legitimate role in our new digital economy, but one need not accept the legitimacy of those activities when conducted for nefarious purposes (think identity theft or chip-modding to facilitate video game piracy.)

I believe that the Internet has empowered the masses and created a world of “pro-sumers” that gives every man, woman, and child a soapbox on which to speak to the world. But that does not mean that all of them will have something interesting to say, and I won’t praise user-generated content as a good in and of itself. It’s quality, not volume, that counts.

I believe that the Internet’s empowering nature has changed much about society and culture, but I do not believe in the romanticism some espouse about how the Net “remaking man” or changing human nature in any fundamental way. The Internet does not liberate us from all earthly constraints and it cannot magically solve all of civilization’s problems.

I believe that the Internet is reinvigorating deliberative democracy and giving us increased exposure to a breathtaking diversity of views previously inaccessible. On the other hand, I understand that some will often seek out only those views that reinforce their pre-existing biases.

I believe in the liberating power of freedom of speech and expression, and appreciate that the Internet and the rise of user-generated content has given us a world of unprecedented information and cultural riches. I also understand, however, that unrestricted freedom of speech and expression permits an increase in the prevalence of objectionable, even loathsome, speech and content. On net, however, (excuse the pun) the Internet is the most important medium of human communication and expression yet.

In sum, there are more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic about the Internet and its role in shaping our lives, culture, economy, and society. But that doesn’t mean it will be all roses going forward.

­­­­___

Additional Reading (from me):

• Two Schools of Internet Optimism
• The Digital Decade’s Definitive Reading List: Internet & Info-Tech Policy Books of the 2000s
• Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists
• Can Humans Cope with Information Overload? Tyler Cowen & John Freeman Join the Debate
• Book Review: Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age
• Book Review: Jaron Larnier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
• Book Review: A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron
• Book Review: Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine
• Book Review: Nick Carr’s Big Switch and The Shallows
• Book Review: Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin
• Thoughts on Andrew Keen, Part 1: Why an Age of Abundance Really is Better than an Age of Scarcity
• Thoughts on Andrew Keen, Part 2: The Dangers of the Stasis Mentality
• The 10 Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2009
• The Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008

Additional Reading (from others):

• Plato on writing
• Cyberspace and Information Overload (by Tim Lee)
• Michiko Kakutani essay in the New York Times, “Texts Without Contexts”
• Andrew McAfee’s terrific essay “I Know I’m Not the Only Internet Optimist…” from his blog
• the great PBS documentary about these issues: “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” (+ my thoughts on the film)
• a video from a Family Online Safety Institute event about the PBS documentary that features a discussion about Internet optimism vs. pessimism
• Gordon Crovitz of The Wall Street Journal asks “Is Technology Good or Bad?”
• Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal argues that “Information Overload is Nothing New“
• “Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World,” by Michael Sacasas
• “Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds“, by Aaron Saenz at the Singularity Hub blog

• and here’s a great video from 1995 featuring the late Neil Postman with his pessimistic take on cyberspace..

Also, courtesy of the Brain Pickings blog, check out this amazing 1972 documentary based on Alvin Toffler’s famous 1970 book, Future Shock. It perfectly foreshadowed so many of today’s technology policy debates.

2009 was not as big of a year for Internet and information technology (“info-tech”) policy books as 2008 was, but there were still some notable titles released that offered interesting perspectives about the future of the Net and the impact the Digital Revolution is having on our lives, culture, and economy.  So, like last year, I figured I would throw together my list of the 10 most important info-tech policy books of the year.

First, let me repeat a few of the same caveats and disclaimers that I set forth last year.  What qualifies as an “important” info-tech policy book? Simply put, it’s a title that many people are currently discussing and that we will likely be referencing for many years to come.  However, I want to be clear that merely because a book appears on my list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything said in it. In fact, as was the case in previous years, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the most important books of 2009 and I find that the cyber-libertarianism I subscribe to has very few fans out there.

Another caveat: Narrowly-focused titles lose a few points on my list. For example, if a book deals mostly with privacy issues, copyright law, or antitrust policy, it does not exactly qualify as the same sort of “tech policy book” as other titles found on this list since it is a narrow exploration of just one set of issues with a bearing on technology policy.

With those caveats in mind, here are my choices for the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2009.

(1) Chris Anderson – Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson’s 2006 book The Long Tail will be remembered as one of the most influential tech policy books of the decade.  It changed the way we talk about the digital marketplace and it instantly garnered a huge audience outside of the nerdy world of Internet policy.  While Free: The Future of a Radical Price will forever live in the shadow of The Long Tail, it too is an important book and in many ways it is a much better one.

In The Long Tail, Anderson tried too hard to invent the latest business theory du jour, and in doing so he went much too far in proclaiming that, as the subtitle of the book argued, “the future of the business is selling less of more.”  That’s just not true. While there’s certainly a lot more action in the long tail than ever before since it is so much more accessible, that does not mean the entire future of business lies in “selling less of more.”  To the contrary, the fat head of the tail is just as profitable as ever.

Free certainly contains some of the flamboyance on display in The Long Tail, but Anderson has matured as a writer and is now far more willing to point out the limitations of his theories in a business sense.  He does a splendid job in Free of creating a taxonomy of free-oriented business models to guide discussions about these issues.  And he explains how “free” can be part of many different business models and strategies. His historical treatment of the issues is outstanding and includes many entertaining examples of how these “free” strategies have been used over time to offer innovative new goods and services.

The reason his book is important for Internet policy discussions is obvious: “free” is increasingly viewed as a threat to many existing companies, industry sectors, and traditional media business models.  For example, battles about the future of journalism and search engine indexing of news sites are obviously tied up with battles over “free.”  And, it goes without saying that the traditional entertainment industry business models are increasingly challenged by “free” as many struggle to adapt to the new realities of the online world, in which “free” (primarily advertising-supported  and “freemium” models) seems to be the only model with any legs.

Much like my top pick for 2008 book of the year, Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Net and How to Stop It, Chris Anderson’s Free is the most important information technology book of the year because it is the one we will still be talking about the most a decade from now.  However, unlike Zittrain’s book and thesis, which I think will be largely discredited in another ten years, Anderson’s book will likely be viewed as an important and lasting contribution to the field.

(2) Larry Downes – The Laws of Disruption: Chaos and Control in Your Virtual Future

The Laws of Disruption is the closest thing you will find to a genuine cyber-libertarian manifesto these days.  But Downes isn’t a rigid ideologue; his skepticism of government regulation of the high-tech economy is based more on practical considerations and the fundamental “law of disruption”: “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.” Downes says this law is “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life” and that 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 argues, “conflicts between social, economic, political, and legal systems” will intensify and “nothing can stop the chaos that will follow.” In this sense, The Laws of Disruption reads like an addendum to one of Alvin Toffler’s old books on technology and futurism in that Downes is essentially walking us through the practical consequences of life in a “post-industrial society.”

In terms of what it all means for public policy, Downes doesn’t so much fear legal and regulatory over-reach the way many cyber-libertarians do. Rather, he thinks most regulatory schemes just won’t work. In essence, he is a technological fatalist or consequentialist: Progress happens whether we like it or not, so get used to it!  Thus, the “laws of disruption” he articulates serve primarily as “Just-Don’t-Bother” warnings to over-eager government meddlers. “The best way to regulate innovation is to leave it alone,” he counsels.

In terms of structure, The Laws of Disruption resembles Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis, (which I reviewed here last year and named to my 2008 list). Both books survey a vast swath of territory — privacy, copyright, security, etc — and each chapter offers unique perspectives on each debate. In that sense, the book is useful to readers if for no other reason than you get a taste for how a wide variety of issues are playing out. Downes also owes much to Clayton M. Christensen and his seminal 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Like that book, The Laws of Disruption is a business book with a strong policy hook.  That is, both books focus on advice-dishing for companies and innovators looking to “stay ahead of the curve” in the midst of relentless, gut-wrenching technological change, but the books also include important lessons regarding the public policies that should govern high-tech sectors.

I highly recommended The Laws of Disruption and found it to be the most enjoyable of all the books I read this year.

(3) Dawn C. Nunziato – Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age

Dawn Nunziato is the perfect foil for Larry Downes. Her book is a manifesto for cyber-collectivism and “media access theory.”  (For those unfamiliar with media access theory, see my old essay: “Your Soapbox is My Soapbox! Thoughts on the Media Access Movement in General and the Media & Democracy Coalition’s ‘Bill of Media Rights’ in Particular.”)  She attempts to bring media access theory up to date by taking the ideas made famous by Jerome Barron, Owen Fiss, Cass Sunstein, and others, and applying them to the Internet and digital technologies.  Like those earlier legal thinkers, she argues for “an affirmative conception” of the First Amendment that would allow government to use the First Amendment to “facilitate the conditions necessary for democratic self-government” (whatever that means). Net neutrality regulation becomes one of many ways she would put this theory into action. Importantly, she would not stop with ISPs. She makes the case for extending the entire regulatory regime to Google and search platforms. Welcome to the Brave New World of the the FCC as the Federal Search Commission or Federal Cloud Commission!

Her attempt to cast Net neutrality as the Internet’s First Amendment is a grotesque contortion of the real First Amendment, and a complete betrayal of the Founder’s original intentions.  As I made clear in my recent essay on “Net Neutrality Regulation & the First Amendment,” the Internet’s First Amendment is the First Amendment, not some new, top-down, heavy-handed regulatory regime that puts the Federal Communications Commission in control of the Digital Economy. Her conception of the First Amendment would convert it from a shield against government control into a sword that the government could use as it wished. It would mean that “Congress shall make no law…” would suddenly be replaced by “Congress shall make whatever law it wants” so long as it serves some amorphous “public interest.” Can you say “tyranny of the majority”?

Regardless, event though I find her views to be morally repugnant and the antithesis of true digital freedom, Nunziato’s book is a concise articulation of that vision and it deserves everyone’s attention. It serves as a blueprint for where the Net neutrality wars are taking us.

(4) David Bollier – Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own

David Bollier’s Viral Spiral is the first major history of the “digital commons” / “free culture” movement, and despite my many person disagreements with him and this movement, it is an excellent treatment of the topic. Bollier surveys this growing intellectual movement from its early open source days to the rise of the Creative Commons and on into the present.  The cast of characters in this drama will be well-known to anyone involved in modern tech policy debates: Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai Benkler, et al.

There is absolutely no doubt that this intellectual movement is winning the war of ideas in cyberlaw front today, as I noted in a recent debate with Lessig and Zittrain over at Cato Unbound.  As a cyber-libertarian, I find myself occasionally at odds with these guys and this movement on a variety of policy issues, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying David Bollier’s treatment of this movement and these issues.

(5) David Post – In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace

David Post is one of the early intellectual giants in the field of cyberlaw. Back in the days when most of us were still just trying to get our 14.4 modems to work properly to get on Al Gore’s “Information Highway,” David Post was writing essays and law review articles that were a decade ahead of their time.  In particular, his work on Internet governance and jurisdictional matters was path-breaking, and much of it is updated and extended in Jefferson’s Moose.

I must admit, however, that I was hoping for a bit more from David in this book.  Beyond just being a first-rate intellectual in this space, he is also one of the few remaining defenders of “Internet exceptionalism,” and he has genuine cyber-libertarian leanings.  After waiting almost 10 years for David to wrap this thing up after he first told me about it back around 2000, I was thinking he might come up with the sort of cyber-libertarian manifesto I’ve always hoped he would write.  Although he fell a bit short in that regard, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good book. It is. You will enjoy it no matter what cyber-philosophy you subscribe to.

Read my entire review of Jefferson’s Moose here.

(6) Dennis Baron – A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

Baron’s A Better Pencil is a splendid history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before in my essays on “Internet optimists vs. pessimists” (See: 1, 2, 3).   Baron notes that almost as soon as people learned to put chisel to stone and then quill to paper, a great debate began about the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And that debate rages on today with a new generation of optimists and skeptics battling over the impact that computing, the Internet, and digital technologies have on our lives and on how we learn about the world.

Baron walks us through a litany of historical examples—the printing press, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters, pocket calculators, personal computers, word processors, webpages, blogs, social-networking sites, and more—and identifies the usual pattern: we greet each new technology with deep distrust and dire warnings, but in time we adapt to the new realities. Indeed, as a species, we have an unparalleled ability to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t always like technological change, and often we deeply resent or fear it, but in the end, we learn to live with it and eventually to embrace it.  With the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, we see this pattern unfolding once again. But Baron counsels patience and understanding instead of the sort f hysteria and backlash we see from the likes of Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel and others.  It’s a refreshing and uplifting perspective.

Highly recommended. See my complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil over at the City Journal website.

(7) Mark Helprin – Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto

No book has been more disappointing to me in recent memory than Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism. As someone who still finds a lot to defend in copyright law, I was excited when I learned that one of America’s most gifted authors–and the author of my favorite literary work of the late 20th century (A Soldier of the Great War)–was taking a crack defending copyright in a short manifesto.

Alas, as I argued in my review of the book for National Review, 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 “cyber-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. Channeling the ghost of the late social critic Neil Postman, Helprin’s critique of copyright skeptics quickly turns into an all-out assault on modern digital culture and cyberspace. He argues 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 it just gets worse from there. Much like recent rants by Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel, Helprin speaks repeatedly about the “surrender of human nature” to “the machine revolution” and the corresponding need to “control the machine.”

How a man who has penned some of the most beautiful prose in modern times could craft an off-the-rails screed of this magnitude remains incomprehensible  to me.  What’s worse is that he set back the cause of defending what’s best about copyright in the process. Luckily for Helprin, there’s plenty of hysteria on the other side, as the next book on my list makes clear.

(8) William Patry – Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

Bill Patry is an angry man. He is the anti-Helprin. The vitriol that Helprin directs against the copyright-haters is reversed in this screed and turned against not just copyright holders and content creators, but against the entire capitalist system. Patry, who is the author of a multi-volume treatise on copyright law, has done the intellectual equivalent of “going postal” within his own intellectual community. He has turned his intellectual guns on anyone and everyone who has ever had a kind word to say about copyright. He cannot find one nice thing to say about copyright or anyone who defends copyright in this book. Not one.

What’s most ironic about the book is that Patry seems utterly oblivious to the fact that in the process of critiquing the inflammatory rhetoric and “misuse of language” occasionally emanating from some copyright defenders, he goes completely over the top himself and engages in even more egregious rhetorical flourishes. Choice gems from the book include: “digital guillotines,” copyright as “cancer,” “copyright dwarves,” Maoism, the “sins” of copyright, “socialism for the wealthy,” and a comparison of the DMCA to “Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.”  Apparently when it comes to the “misuse of language,” Patry believes that two wrongs make a right.

And then there is his mind-boggling conclusion that: “I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries.”  Apparently, every great book, every great movie, every great video game, and ever great musical composition of the past century was done solely for the love of it all. Copyright had apparently had absolutely nothing to do with it according to Patry’s logic. That is just an astonishingly naive notion, in my opinion. Apparently this man’s hatred for copyright-related industries is so intense that it has blinded him to any potentially positive effects of copyright law. If nothing else, it would have been nice to see Mr. Patry address how it is that America is the world’s leading creator and exporter of creative arts.  Certainly copyright law must have had something to do with that!

Chapter 5 of his book makes it clear that Patry’s critique of copyright is actually rooted in a much deeper suspicion about capitalism itself.  He speaks of “the myth of economic freedom” and claims that “free market fundamentalism… destroyed much of the world’s economies.”  He then launches into a neo-Marxist critique of property rights more generally, treating property as a zero-sum game of winners and losers.  At times it all begins to sound like a rant from an old Herbert Marcuse book with questions like: “why are the interests of one social group favored over another?” and “What social objective is being furthered by the decision to privilege one group over another?”  And there’s all sorts of talk about “regulation in the public interest,” which I have critique as a meaningless non-standard here many times before.

In the end, Patry’s book will–along with Helprin’s–long be remember as marking the nadir in the “copyright wars;” a moment when grown men of great intelligence decided to trade in their integrity for the opportunity to engage in below-the-belt rhetorical cheap shots that would typically be reserved for college student debating politics over beers and shots at two in the morning.  They should both be ashamed of themselves.

(9) Gary Reback – Free the Market!  Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive

Gary Reback’s over-the-top ode to antitrust as the great savior of capitalism reads like an extended love letter. As I noted in my lengthy critique of his book, his fairy tale narrative of antitrust as the savior of capitalism is hopelessly one-sided, and his recommendations to expand antitrust enforcement wouldn’t “Free the Market” as he argues in his book’s shameful title, but would instead wrap it in regulatory chains.

He repeatedly insults the intelligence of the reader by claiming antitrust is supposedly not a form of economic regulation and that is can only have beneficial effects. He wants antitrust officials to intervene early and often in high-tech markets to guide markets to a supposedly better place. Reback considers just about everything “the Chicago School” taught us to be antitrust apostasy and he would like to erase four decades worth of economic literature and evidence that suggests antitrust law is a form of economic regulation and does have unintended consequences that often hurt consumer welfare.  Even if you are not an inherent antitrust skeptic like me, I think most people would hope for a better treatment of the other side of this story.

Read my lengthy review of Reback’s Strangle Free the Market here.

(10) tie – Tyler Cowen – Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World and John Freeman – The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

OK, so I just couldn’t figure out which of these two to cut from the list so I took the easy way out by having them tie for the last slot!  In this case, however, there’s another reason it makes sense for both of them to round out the list: Both Freeman and Cowen explore how humans are coping with information overload–albeit from two very different perspectives.

As I noted in my lengthy essay on the topic earlier this year, Cowen is an unrepentant optimist. He believes humans have the ability to adapt to new technological realities and a world of information abundance. In fact, Cowen argues, new tools and information gathering and processing technologies actually “lengthens our attention spans in another way, namely by allowing greater specialization of knowledge.”

John Freeman, by contrast, wants us all to take a high-tech time out. Like other Internet skeptics, he is worried that cyberspace and digital technologies are reshaping humanity–and not for the better. “If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur,” he argues. “It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them.”

Unlike most other Internet pessimists, however, Freeman’s tone is more measured and his recommendations more reasonable.  Of course, it helps that he is magical wordsmith. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with many of his ultimate conclusions–as I did–you should read The Tyranny of E-Mail for a lesson in how to construct an argument and to appreciate the gift of fine writing. It’s easily the best tract by any Net skeptic since Nick Carr’s The Big Switch, and a much better one in many ways. It will force you to ask tough questions about the impact of the Information Age on you and the world around you.  Nonetheless, I remain an unrepentant techno-optimist (albeit a pragmatic one)!

Honorable Mentions: Here are a couple of other books that I couldn’t fit on my list but that you might want to also consider adding to your bookshelf:

• Manuel Castells – Communication Power
• James Boyle – The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
• Randall Stross – Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know [my review]
• Ken Auletta – Googled: The End of the World As We Know It [my review]
• Scott Rosenberg- Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters
• John W. Dozier Jr. and Sue Scheff – Google Bomb

Please let me know what titles might be missing from this list and which books you think are the best of the year.

And speaking of bookshelves, here’s my Shelfari digital bookshelf in case anyone is interested. If you hadn’t figured it out yet, I am a bit of book nerd!  My life is spent swimming through oceans of paper.  My friends often ask me, “How can you spend so much time reading?” My question back to them is: “How can you not?”

Seems like everywhere I turn someone is gushing about their new Droid phone, including my TLF colleagues Berin Szoka, Braden Cox, and Ryan Radia, who all had great fun rubbing their new toys in my nose over the past couple of days. And why not, it’s a very cool little device.  It makes my HTC Touch seems positively archaic in some ways, and it’s only a year old.  Apparently, 100,000 people already picked up a Droid in just its first weekend on the market.

But here’s the first thing that pops in my mind every time I see someone showing off their new Droid: How can a device like this even exist when America’s leading cyberlaw experts have been telling us that the whole digital world is increasingly going to hell because of “closed” devices, proprietary code, and managed networks?  I’m speaking, of course, about the lamentations of Harvard professors Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and their many disciples.  As faithful readers will recall, I have relentlessly hammered this crew for their unwarranted cyber-Chicken Little-ism and hyper techno-pessimism. (See my many battles with Zittrain [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 + video] and my 2-part debate with Lessig earlier this year).

“Left to itself,” Lessig warned in Code, “cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.”  He went on to forecast a dystopian future in which nefarious corporate schemers would quash our digital liberties unless benevolent public philosopher kings stepped in to save our poor souls. Code was the Old Testament of cyber-collectivism. The New Testament arrived last year with Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. In it, we hear the grim prediction that “sterile and tethered” digital technologies and networks will triumph over the more “open and generative” devices and systems of the past.  The iPhone and TiVo are cast as villains in Zittrain’s drama since they apparently represent the latest manifestations of Lessig’s “perfect control” paranoia.

Apple’s “Angel of Death”

How completely out-of-control has this thinking gotten?  Well, here’s David Weinberger — another Harvard Berkman Center worrywart — talking about that supposed satanic font of all evil, the Apple AppStore:

The AppStore is the seductive angel of death for computing. It enables Apple to keep quality up and, more important, to keep support costs down. But a computer that can’t be programmed except by its manufacturer (or with the permission of its manufacturer) isn’t a real computer. The success of the AppStore is a gloomy, scary harbinger. From controlling the apps that can go on its mobile phone, it’s a short step for Apple to decide to control the apps that can go on its rumored slate/netbook device. And since so much of the future of computing will occur on mobiles and netbooks, this portends a serious de-generation of computing, as predicted by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

The “angel of death”? A “gloomy, scary harbinger”? Wow, who knew!  In Weinberger’s world, Apple is guilty of the heinous crime of “keep[ing] quality up and, more important, [keeping] support costs down.”  OH MY GOD, how dare they.  Somebody make them stop!  No, seriously, how silly is all this? It’s like those Republicans who, in their zeal to do anything to defeat health care nationalization, decide it’s OK to make up spooky stories about “death panels” hidden deep inside congressional bills.

I find Weinberger’s claim that “a serious de-generation of computing” is looming because of the iPhone to be especially ridiculous. It’s the same sort of rubbish Lessig was spewing in Code when he predicted that AOL’s walled garden model was going to take over the entire cyber-world and ensure “perfect control,” just one of the many things Lessig got wrong in the book.  And it’s the same silliness we see at work in Zittrain’s work when he claims that we’re doomed to live in a world of closed “sterile and tethered” digital technologies and networks. Similarly, last year, Public Knowledge analyst Alex Curtis managed to reach the zenith of this rhetorical insanity when he likened the Apple App Store to an Orwellian Big Brother that was bringing us a “1984 kind of total control.”  You know, because Apple is forcing us all to own iPhones and locking us into re-education camps.  Right.

I Fart, Therefore I Am (Generative)

Which brings me back to the Droid.  If all these dour predictions about the death of digital generativity and the rise of closed networks and walled gardens were true, how in the world does a phone with an open source operating system and a completely open applications process for developers even exist? (Android devices like the Droid don’t require users to rely exclusively on the Android Marketplace for apps; you can run other apps if you like).

Moreover, it’s not just that a remarkably innovative and generative device like the Droid gets widespread release and praise, it’s the fact that there are countless other mobile devices and applications on the market today much like it. On the Zittrainian “generative-vs.-sterile appliance” spectrum, the range of mobile devices just continues to grow and grow in both directions. You can decide exactly what type of device you want.  But here’s the more important point: How much of a difference does it even make how “open” these phones and app stores are?  You’ve got more “closed” systems like Apple’s iPhone and Palm’s Pre on one end of the spectrum and then more “open” systems like the Droid and even many Windows Mobile devices on the other end, but do these competing models really result in many difference in terms of functionality and innovation?  The reality is this: tons of innovation is occurring across all of these devices and platforms regardless of how “open” or “closed” they may be.

For example, when I go to Handango, a terrific mobile application marketplace, and search for “all apps” available for my HTC Touch (which runs a Windows Mobile OS), my senses are assaulted with 6,677 choices.  It’s all a bit overwhelming.  Luckily, a quick search can get me right to the important applications I really need — like the “Pocket Fart” app.  Folks, let me tell you, no “generative” device is worth its salt without a good farting application.  I don’t care how bad of a mood my kids are in, when I fire up a fart app, it puts an instant smile on their faces!

But hey, guess what… that “angel of death,” the iPhone Store, offers fart apps, too!  Dozens and dozens of fart apps, in fact.  In terms of Zittrainian generativity, the iPhone is positively fart-tastic. Just check out that video below. And in addition to those dozens of flatulence apps, the Apple AppStore has another 100,000 apps available for downloading, making it the largest applications store in the world. And back in September, Apple announced that more than two billion apps had been downloaded from the App Store in its short existence. That’s Billion with a “B”.  Does this sound like it “portends a serious de-generation of computing” as Weinberger suggests?  Incidentally, if he’s so frightened that Steve Jobs is the Grim Reaper incarnate he can always go find another phone. Seriously, Steve Jobs doesn’t force anybody to buy one of these expensive toys.

If the iPhone is Good Enough for Zittrain, Why Isn’t It Fine for the Rest of Us?

Incidentally, despite all the fear and loathing about Steve Jobs and the iPhone that one finds in Future of the Internet, I was very entertained to discover that Jonathan Zittrain is an iPhone user himself!  I used some shameless McCarthyite tactics during our debate at New America Foundation last year — “Are you now, or have you ever been, an iPhone user!” — to publicly out him. [Go to the 55:00 minute mark of the video to see.]  But my point to him that day was a serious one: If you so fear the death of generativity because of that little demonic device, than why carry one in your coat pocket?  Why not use a device that lets you break all the rules because it essentially has no rules?  There are multiple open source mobile operating systems and a thriving community of “homebrew” developers. Go spend a few minutes at PCC Geeks or Howard’s Forums and see what I mean.

But the Berkman boys don’t seem content with all that.  And I wouldn’t usually give a damn about the lunacy of these hyper-pessimistic prognostications from the Harvard crew if it was all just harmless cyber-sourpuss ramblings from the ivory tower geeks with too much time on their hands.  But the problem is that these people want regulators to take steps to correct these supposed “code failures,” as Lessig calls them.  Zittrain calls for “API neutrality” in his book, which would force net neutrality-like mandates on digital devices. And in a New York Times editorial this summer entitled “Lost in the Cloud,” he made it clear that cloud neutrality regulation was next on the list. [Others are joining that call.] I’ve got a serious problem with that, as I detailed extensively in earlier essays (here and here), and Berin Szoka and I have discussed how these escalating neutrality wars are bound to lead to the digital equivalent of “mutually assured destruction” within the tech community before it’s all over.

Finally, when the Berkman gang, which is the most respected cyberlaw shop in the land, go around casting these debates with terms like “evil” applications and “angels of death,” then I have a serious problem because the game you are playing becomes hazardous to the health of the digital economy.  This poisons the public policy debate by using absurd moralistic rhetoric about something as fundamentally agnostic as digital platforms and protocols.  These things are neither good nor evil; they are just choices.  They represent different ways of promoting innovation.  And we should be happy that our current digital marketplace is offering us a rich mosaic of business models and options that can fill almost any need and fit almost any picky user’s desires.  If that ain’t progress, I don’t what is.

I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before in my essays on “Internet optimists vs. pessimists” (See: 1, 2, 3).

I have a complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil now up on the City Journal‘s website here.  I’ve also pasted it down below.

Plato Wrote it Down by Adam Thierer

a review of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, by Dennis Baron (Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $24.95)

In the beginning, Dennis Baron reminds us in his new book, A Better Pencil, there was the word—the spoken word, that is. Oral tradition, the passing of knowledge through stories and lectures, was the primary method of instruction and learning throughout early human civilization. But then a few innovative souls decided to start writing everything down on stones and clay. Almost as soon as they did, a great debate began on the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And it rages on today, with a new generation of optimists and skeptics battling over the impact that computing, the Internet, and digital technologies have on our lives and on how we learn about the world.

Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, begins his splendid history of these debates with the well-known tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. The Egyptian god Theuth boasts to King Thamus about how his invention of writing will improve the wisdom and memory of the masses. Thamus shoots back, “The discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.” Thamus then passes judgment on writing’s impact on society, saying he fears that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Of course, as Baron points out, we remember this warning only “because Plato wrote it down.” It’s one of the recurrent ironies in the history of techno-skepticism that while “the shock of the new often brings out critics eager to warn us away,” those critics often embrace—or, at the very least, benefit from—the very tools that they want the rest of us to shun. Whether it’s Luddites On-Line winning Yahoo’s “Cool Site of the Day” award, or the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association promoting National Handwriting Day via the Internet, or Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto attracting unprecedented readership thanks to its availability on the Web, those who have a “common tendency to romanticize the good old ways” of doing things often fail to appreciate how new technology can benefit society—including themselves.

Baron walks us through a litany of historical examples—the printing press, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters, pocket calculators, personal computers, word processors, webpages, blogs, social-networking sites, and more—and identifies the usual pattern: we greet each new technology with deep distrust and dire warnings, but in time we adapt to the new realities. Indeed, as a species, we have an unparalleled ability to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t always like technological change, and often we deeply resent or fear it, but in the end, we learn to live with it and eventually to embrace it.

With the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, we see this pattern unfolding once again. “According to the latest generation of critics and naysayers,” Baron notes, “today it is computers that are producing texts whose value and credibility we question; computers that are giving too many people control over the creation and publication of text; computers that are wreaking havoc with our handwriting.” Contemporary critics also fret over “information overload.”

The backlash against computers and digitization began while the Internet was still in its cradle, with the 1992 publication of Neil Postman’s anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman’s intellectual descendants include Internet critics such as Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, and Mark Helprin, whose works drip with disdain for all things digital. They warn of a coming dystopia where truth and authority vanish, culture crumbles, and political polarization breeds closed-mindedness and even the death of deliberative democracy.

These overly pessimistic critics turn a blind eye to both the wonders of the digital age and humanity’s ability to adapt. As Baron persuasively argues, “English survives, conversation thrives online as well as off, and on balance, digital communications seems to be enhancing human interaction, not detracting from it.” In fact, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that previous generations would have found unimaginable. As Baron puts it: “The Internet is a true electronic frontier where everyone is on his or her own: all manuscripts are accepted for publication, they remain in virtual print forever, and no one can tell writers what to do.” Such human empowerment is worth celebrating, even if it does have the occasional downside. Abundance is better than a world of scarce choices and few voices.

Baron’s retelling of the history of techno-skepticism is edifying, but it leaves one with the nagging feeling that these debates will never cease. Each generation will witness a technological watershed that brings out a fresh crop of both pollyannas and pessimists. Like Plato, however, most of us will embrace whatever’s next and move forward.

I’ve posted another response in the Cato Unbound online debate over the impact of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace upon the book’s 10th anniversary.  You will recall that I went fairly hard on Prof. Lessig in my essay, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control,’” and Lessig responded with a counter-punch that went after me for it.  I respond in a new essay about “Our Conflict of Cyber-Visions.” In the piece, I address Lessig’s assertion that I just didn’t understand the central teachings of Code, as well as his reluctance to accept the “cyber-collectivism” label that I affixed to his book and life’s work.  Again, please hop over to Cato Unbound for my complete response.

But one thing from the essay that I thought worth reproducing here is my effort to better define the key principles that separate the cyber-libertarian and cyber-collectivist schools of thinking.  I argue that it comes down to this:

The cyber-libertarian believes that “code failures” are ultimately better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up, marketplace responses than by coerced, top-down, governmental solutions. Moreover, the decisive advantage of the market-driven approach to correcting code failure comes down to the rapidity and nimbleness of those response(s).

Of course, another key difference relates to how quickly one jumps to the conclusion that “code failures” are actually occurring at all. I argue:

What concerns me about the way Prof. Lessig approaches these issues in Code and in his subsequent work is that he is far too quick to declare the debate over by labeling short-term code hiccups as sky-is-falling market failures. The end result of such myopic techno-pessimism is the inevitable call for governments to intervene and “do something” to correct supposed code failures.  The cyber-libertarian instead counsels patience. Let’s give those other forces — alternative platforms, new innovators, social norms, public pressure, etc. — a chance to work some magic. Evolution happens, if you let it. Moreover, if you are always running around crying “market failure!” and calling in the code cops, it creates perverse marketplace incentives by discouraging efforts to innovate or “route around” bad code or code failure. We don’t want the whole world sitting around waiting for government to regulate the mousetrap to improve it or even give everyone better access to it; we should want the world to be innovating to create better mousetraps! To reiterate a key point I already stressed in my original essay: One need not believe that the markets in code are “perfectly competitive” to accept that they are “competitive enough” — or at least, better than regulatory alternatives.

Anyway, please head over to the Cato site to read the whole thing and let me know what you think.  If nothing else, I’m sure that Seth Finkelstein will have something incredibly nasty to say about me!  And I will wear his scorn as a badge of honor.

The week-long Cato Unbound online debate about the 10th anniversary of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace continues today with Prof. Lessig’s response to Declan McCullagh’s opening essay, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” Jonathan Zittrain’s follow-up essay, and my essay on, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control.’”  Needless to say, Prof. Lessig isn’t too happy with my response. You should jump over to the Cato site to read the entire thing, but here are a couple of excerpts and my response.

To my suggestion that there is a qualitative difference between law and code, Prof. Lessig says:

I’ve argued that things aren’t quite a simple as some libertarians would suggest. That there’s not just bad law. There’s bad code. That we don’t need to worry just about Mussolini. We also need to worry about DRM or the code AT&T deploys to help the government spy upon users. That public threats to liberty can be complemented by private threats to liberty. And that the libertarian must be focused on both.  […] Of course, law is law. Who could be oblivious to that? And who would need a book to explain it?  But the fact that “law is law” does not imply that it has a “much greater impact in shaping markets and human behavior.” Sometimes it does — especially when that “law” is delivered by a B1 bomber. But ask the RIAA whether it is law or code that is having a “greater impact in shaping markets” for music. Or ask the makers of Second Life whether the citizens of that space find themselves more constrained by the commercial code of their geo-jurisdiction or by the fact that the software code of Second Life doesn’t permit you simply to walk away (so to speak) with another person’s scepter. Whether and when law is more effective than code is an empirical matter — something to be studied, and considered, not dismissed by banalities spruced up with italics.

Well, I beg the professor’s pardon for excessive use of italics.  [I won’t ask for an apology for misspelling my last name in his piece!] Regardless, it’s obvious that we’ll just never see eye-to-eye on the crucial distinction between law and code. Again, as I stated in my essay: “With code, escape is possible. Law, by contrast, tends to lock in and limit; spontaneous evolution is supplanted by the stagnation of top-down, one-size-fits-all regulatory schemes.”

Lessig largely dismisses much of this with that last line above, suggesting that we just need to keep studying the matter to determine the right mix of what works best.  To be clear, while I’m all for studying the impact of law vs. code as “an empirical matter,” that in turn begs the question of how we define effectiveness or success. I suspect that the professor and I would have a “values clash” over some rather important first principles in that regard.  This is, of course, a conflict of visions that we see throughout the history of philosophy; a conflict between those who put the individual and the individual’s rights at the core of any ethical political system versus those who would place the rights of “the community,” “the public” or some other amorphous grouping(s) at the center of everything.  It’s a classic libertarian vs. communitarian / collectivist debate.

Lessig, however, makes it clear in his response that he doesn’t take kindly to being called a cyber-collectivist, even accusing me of “red-baiting” by using the term.  But the collectivism of which I speak is a more generic type; not the hard-edged Marxist brand of collectivism of modern times.   What separates Lessig’s brand of cyber-collectivism from the cyber-libertarianism that I espouse is a general preference for who calls the shots most of the time.  Quite obviously, I place an enormous amount of faith in largely unfettered markets in code to generally advance the values of individual liberty, freedom of speech, and economic innovation more often than rule by politics and public officials will.  Prof. Lessig is obviously far more enamored with the potential of the state and politics to play a beneficial role in shaping things.

Thus, even though Prof. Lessig rejects the association, Declan McCullagh was right to point to the distant influence of Plato on Code and much of Lessig’s other work.  (And there’s a bit of Rousseauian influence there, too.)  In any event, if Prof. Lessig takes offense at this label and wants to call his approach something other than cyber-collectivism, than by all means be my guest; invent a new term and I’ll use it.  But to me, as a student of political philosophy, I see his philosophy as just another variant of collectivism and just don’t know what else to call it.  This isn’t “red-baiting;” it’s simply an exercise in philosophical classification.

To some extent, Prof.  Lessig undercuts my arguments here in concluding his essay by asking that we “focus on a large number of difficult questions that remain… about how to preserve the liberty of society and the Net against the ever-expanding harm caused by the captured corruption that we call democratic government.”  Hey, now that sounds like something a true libertarian might say! (Except that we would have likely used the phrase “preserve the liberty of the individual” instead of “society”!) Regardless, Lessig is at least willing to admit that there may be some problems in paradise for Platonist thinking or Rousseauian romanticism.

Alas, for reasons articulated quite nicely here by Tim Lee in the past, “Lessig clearly understands what it takes to catch the interest of conservative- and libertarian-minded readers, and he’s not above spinning his arguments to maximize their appeal to the people he’s addressing.” For the libertarian, there is only one fool-proof solution to the problem of government corruption: You shrink the Leviathan. From what I’ve seen of Lessig’s proposals so far to address corruption, however, he’s not really willing to have that conversation. It’s all about the old “getting money out of politics” and “kill all the lobbyists” approach. Unfortunately, as Tim notes:

The problem isn’t that there’s a discrete list of corrupt practices that we can identify and prohibit. The problem is that if politicians are willing to be corrupted, and special interests are willing to spend resources to corrupt them, they’ll find ways to get it done. You can certainly reduce the effect on the margin — by banning overt bribery, for example — but once you’ve banned the really obvious categories of back-scratching, it becomes more and more difficult to make any further progress. What’s going on in Washington is disgusting, to be sure, but it’s not new or unique to the United States. And I think fixing it is going to be a lot more challenging than Lessig imagines.

I couldn’t agree more.  Nonetheless, I eagerly await more details from Prof. Lessig regarding his new effort to address corruption in our political system, however he defines it.  He may set forth some reform proposals that we libertarians find quite sensible and ultimately endorse.  But if “reform” instead comes in the form of layers of additional campaign finance regulations, well then, I think we’ll find ourselves disagreeing once again. Because many of those so-called reforms are simply free-speech violating restrictions on the rights of both individuals to petition their government.

But to conclude this exchange on a good note, let me just say that — at least in theory — I wholeheartedly endorse Lawrence Lessig’s call to protect “the Net against the ever-expanding harm caused by the captured corruption that we call democratic government.”   And I hope someday he will be more open to the notion that limits on the power of the state are the ultimate key to accomplishing that goal.

The Cato Unbound online debate about the 10th anniversary of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace continues today with my response to Declan McCullagh’s opening essay, “What Larry Didn’t Get,” as well as Jonathan Zittrain’s follow-up.

In my response, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control,'” I begin by arguing that:

The problem with peddling tales of a pending techno-apocalypse is that, at some point, you may have to account for your prophecies — or false prophecies as the case may be. Hence, the problem for Lawrence Lessig ten years after the publication of his seminal book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

I go on to argue that:

Lessig’s lugubrious predictions proved largely unwarranted. Code has not become the great regulator of markets or enslaver of man; it has been a liberator of both. Indeed, the story of the past digital decade has been the exact opposite of the one Lessig envisioned in Code.

After providing several examples of just how wrong Lessig’s predictions were, I then ask:

[W]hy have Lessig’s predictions proven so off the mark? Lessig failed to appreciate that markets are evolutionary and dynamic, and when those markets are built upon code, the pace and nature of change becomes unrelenting and utterly unpredictable. With the exception of some of the problems identified above, a largely unfettered cyberspace has left digital denizens better off in terms of the information they can access as well as the goods and services from which they can choose. Oh, and did I mention it’s all pretty much free-of-charge? Say what you want about our cyber-existence, but you can’t argue with the price!

I am forced to admit, however, that Lessig’s book has had enormous impact of the field of cyberlaw and digital technology policy:

This brings me to what I believe is the most important impact of Code: the philosophical movement it has spawned. As Declan noted in his opening essay, Code “offered a burgeoning protest movement [a] unifying theme and philosophy” in that it was both a polemic against cyber-libertarianism and a sort of call-to-arms for cyber-collectivism. It gave this movement its central operating principle: Code and cyberspace can be bent to the will of the collective, and it often must be if we are to avoid any number of impending disasters brought on by those nefarious (or just plain incompetent) folks in corporate America. Led by a gifted, prolific set of disciples such as Jonathan Zittrain and Tim Wu, as well as increasingly influential activist groups such as Public Knowledge and Free Press, Lessig’s cyber-collectivists continue to preach skepticism regarding markets and property rights, and a general openness to — and frequent embrace of — government solutions to digital-era dilemmas. […]  Prof. Lessig and his movement are winning the battle of ideas on the cyber-front today. We have Code to thank — or blame — for that.

Please head over to the Cato Unbound website to read the entire thing.  Prof. Lessig’s response is scheduled to be posted on Monday.