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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer on Media & Content Regulation :

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

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

If you haven’t yet had the chance to check out the new Progress Forum, I encourage you to do so. It’s a discussion group for progress studies and all things related to it. The Forum is sponsored by The Roots of Progress. Even though the Forum is still in pre-launch phase, there are already many interesting threads worth checking out. I was my honor to contribute one of the first on the topic, “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” It’s an effort to sort through some of the questions and challenges facing the Progress Studies movement in terms of focus and philosophical grounding. I thought I would just reproduce the essay here, but I encourage you to jump over to the Progress Forum to engage in discussion about it, or the many other excellent discussions happening there on other issues.

________________

Where is “Progress Studies” Going? by Adam Thierer

What do we mean by “Progress Studies” and how can this field of study be advanced? I’ve been thinking about that question a lot since Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen published their 2019 manifesto in  The Atlantic on why “We Need a New Science of Progress.” At present, there is no overarching “unified field theory” of what Progress Studies entails or what underpins it, and that may be holding up progress on Progress Studies. I recently attended an important conference on the “Moral Foundations of Progress Studies,” co-hosted by The Roots of Progress and the Salem Center at UT Austin, where I discovered that many others were grappling with these same issues.

While a broad range of people are interested in Progress Studies, their moral priors differ, sometimes significantly. For example, the UT Austin conference included scholars from diverse disciplines (philosophy, psychology, economics, political science, history, and others) whose thinking was rooted in different philosophical traditions (utilitarianism, effective altruism, individualism, and various hybrids). Everyone shared the goal of advancing human well-being, but participants had different conceptions of the moral foundations of well-being, and even some disagreement about what well-being meant in concrete terms. There were also differing perspectives about what the “studies” part of Progress Studies should entail. Specifically, does it include progress  advocacy, including the potential for specific policy recommendations?

Comprehension vs. Advocacy

Part of the confusion over the nature and goals of Progress Studies can be traced back to Collison and Cowen’s foundational essay. On one hand, their goal was progress  comprehension. “Progress itself is understudied,” Collison and Cowen argued. They lamented that “there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress.”

But Collison and Cowen went further. Their goal was not merely to inspire the development of a field of study that could give us a better understanding of the prerequisites of progress, but also to formulate a plan for advancing progress. They argued that “mere comprehension is not the goal,” and advocated for “the deeper goal of speeding it up.” They went on to say, “the implicit question is how scientists [and others]  should be acting” and that Progress Studies should be viewed as, “closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.” The presupposition here is that progress is important and that we need to take steps to get a lot more of it. Again, we can think of this part of Progress Studies as progress advocacy. And advocacy can entail both advocating for progress generally as well as specific types of policy advocacy.

This raises an interesting question we debated at the UT Austin conference: Can you study something and advocate for it at the same time? Some felt you really cannot separate them, while others believed that the broader questions about how progress has worked could be kept separate from any advocacy efforts. Of course, this same tension between comprehension and advocacy comes up in many other fields.

What Progress Studies Can Learn from STS

In this sense, Progress Studies might learn some important lessons by examining the older but loosely related field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS incorporates a wide variety of mostly “soft science” academic disciplines, such as law, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. These scholars analyze the relationship between technology, society, culture, and politics.

One conclusion from studying STS is obvious: comprehension and advocacy frequently get blurred. Many of the STS scholars who engage in critical studies of the history of technology seamlessly transition into anti-technology advocates, even as many of them claim they are “just studying” the issues. As I’ve noted elsewhere:

When thinking about of technology, STS scholars commonly employ words like “anxiety,” “alienation,” “degradation,” and “discrimination.” Consequently, most of them suggest that the burden of proof lies squarely on scientists, engineers, and innovators to prove that their ideas and inventions will bring worth to society before they are deployed. In other words, STS scholars generally fall in the precautionary principle camp, and their policy prescriptions have grown increasingly radical over time.

Meanwhile, as I discussed in my latest book, many STS scholars describe themselves as “humanists” while implicitly suggesting that those who promote technological progress are somehow callous oafs who only care about the cold calculus of profit-seeking and creating shiny new gadgets we don’t need.

While some STS scholars continue to do important and largely objective work, many others routinely show their more radical leanings in books, essays, and social media posts. Most worrying is their newfound love of Luddism, as they spin revisionist histories of “Why Luddites Matter,” insisting that “There’s Nothing Wrong with Being a Luddite,” and that “I’m a Luddite. You Should Be One Too.” Neil Richards, a law professor and leading STS scholar declares bluntly on Twitter: “Less metaverse, less crypto, less disruptive innovation. More regulation, more ethics, more humanity.” In other words, public policy defaults should be set squarely to the Precautionary Principle and anyone opposed to that is unethical and anti-human. Taken to the extreme, STS scholars marry up this Luddite revisionism with the retrograde philosophy of “degrowth” and produce book chapters with titles like, “Methodological Luddism: A Concept for Tying Degrowth to the Assessment and Regulation of Technologies.”

The Progress Studies movement might consider framing its work as a response to the growing extremism of the STS movement. STS scholars have become so remarkably hostile to the very notion that science and technology are central to human advancement that the field might today better be labeled  Anti-Science & Technology Studies. Yet, these are the scholars that dominate many academic departments where students are learning about technological progress. Progress Studies scholars can push back against that radicalism and offer level-headed, empirical responses to it.

Ensuring A Big Tent 

To improve its chances of success, the Progress Studies movement should seek to broaden its appeal by avoiding a dogmatic party line on its moral foundations while ensuring that multiple disciplines and viewpoints are incorporated into it.

In terms of philosophical underpinnings, those interested in Progress Studies can take different approaches to the moral foundations of progress and human well-being. Many philosophers get frustrated when others fail to hammer out all the detailed nuances of the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of these matters. I understand that urge, but I’ve now spent over 30 years covering technology policy and have been constantly surprised about how many people can come together and agree on a broad set of principles about the importance of progress without sharing a common philosophical framework.

The same is true as it pertains to policy prescriptions. We need to ensure a “big tent” in this way, too. It is already the case that many people engaged in Progress Studies have very different perspectives on issues like intellectual property and industrial policy, for example. I have many friends on different sides of these issues. Importantly, there are not even clear sides on these issues but rather a very broad spectrum of viewpoints. Progress Studies scholars will likely always disagree on the finer points of both types of “IP” policy. Nonetheless, they can remain more unified in stressing the common goal of moving the needle on progress in a positive direction and highlighting the continuing importance of flexible experimentation with policies aimed at enhancing innovation and growth.

To the extent there is any litmus test for the Progress Studies movement, that’s it:  advancing opportunities for innovation and growth is paramount. Regardless of how one grounds their moral philosophy, or goes about constructing a theory of rights, many people can agree that granting humans the freedom to explore, experiment, and be entrepreneurial has important benefits for individuals, families, organizations, and entire nations. Openness to change is what unifies us. Stagnation and “steady state” thinking—and the Precautionary Principle-based policies that flow from such reasoning—are the enemy. 

Thus, the Progress Studies movement can focus on both studying progress and advancing it at the same time, even if some will devote more effort to one priority than the other. And we shouldn’t forget that these two objectives are reinforcing: Comprehension informs advocacy and vice-versa. Progress is a never-ending process of trial-and-error. It’s all about learning by doing. We try, we fail, we learn, and we try again. This is as true for the individuals attempting to make progress in the real-world as it is for scholars studying it and seeking to promote it.

Let us get on with this important work, regardless of what motivates us to do it.

This is a compendium of readings on “ progress studies ,” or essays and books which generally make the case for technological innovation, dynamism, economic growth, and abundance. I will update this list as additional material of relevance is brought to my attention.   

[Last update: 10/11/22]

Recent Essays

• Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a16z.com, October 16, 2023.
• Will Rinehart, “The Abundance Agenda,” The Exformation Newsletter, October 15, 2022.
• Sarah Constantin, “Unblocking Abundance: A Model for Activism,” Rough Diamonds, October 10, 2022.
• Derek Thompson, “The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress,” The Atlantic, May 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Forum, April 23, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “The Case for American Seriousness,” Common Sense, April 18, 2022.
• William Rinehart, “Vetocracy, the Costs of Vetos and Inaction,” Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, March 24, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America?” Faster Please, March 23, 2022.
• John W. Lettieri & Kenan Fikri, “The Case for Economic Dynamism and Why it Matters for the American Worker,” Economic Innovation Group, March 2022.
• Adam Kovacevich, “Saying YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) to “Civic Innovation,” Chamber of Progress, March 21, 2022.
• Eli Dourado, “Remove Barriers to Productivity,” City Journal, March 18, 2022.
• “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” (A conversation with Jason Crawford), Discourse, March 2, 2022.
• Noah Smith, “A New Industrialist Roundup,” Noahpinion, February 3, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “When Will the Next Big Thing Arrive?” Faster Please, February 3, 2022.
• Alec Stapp & Caleb Watney,  “ Progress is a Policy Choice ,” Institute for Progress, January 20, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “ How to Get the Future We Were Promised ,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “ Building American Dynamism ,” Future, January 14, 2022.  
• Derek Thompson, “ A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems ,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.
• Jason Crawford, “Progress, Humanism, Agency: An Intellectual Core for the Progress Movement,” Roots of Progress, January 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
• Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for More Energy,” October 7, 2021.
• Jason Crawford, “ We need a new philosophy of progress ,” The Roots of Progress, August 23, 2021.
• Gale Pooley & Marian L. Tupy, “The Simon Abundance Index 2021,” Human Progress, April 22, 2021.
• Noah Smith, “ Techno-optimism for the 2020s ,” December 3, 2020. 
• Ezra Klein, “ Why We Can’t Build ,” Vox, April 22, 2020.
• Marc Andreesen, “ It’s Time to Build ,” Future, April 18, 2020.
• Eli Dourado, “ How do we move the needle on progress ?” September 26, 2019.
• José Luis Ricón, “ About the ‘Progress’ in Progress Studies ” September 6, 2019.
• Will Rinehart, “ Progress Studies: Some Initial Thoughts ,” August 30, 2019.
• Adam Thierer, “ Is There a Science of Progress ?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “ We Need a New Science of Progress ,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2019.
• Tyler Cowen, “ The Case for the Longer Term ,” Cato Unbound, January 9, 2019.
• Vinod Khosla, “ We Need Large Innovations ,” Medium, January 1, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity ,” Medium, November 19, 2018. 
• Chelsea Follett, “Utopianism: One of the Biggest Obstacles to Progress,” Human Progress, August15, 2018.
• Eli Dourado, “ How Technological Innovation Can Massively Reduce the Cost of Living ,” PlainText, January 29, 2016.

Books

• J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car ? (Stripe Press, 2021).
• Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (New York: Harper, 2020).
• Andrew McAfee, More from Less (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).
• Ronald Bailey & Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute, 2020).
• Arthur M. Diamond Jr., Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2018).
• Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).
• Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
• Tim Harford, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
• Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom , 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• Calestous Juma, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Joe Carlen, A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
• Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).
• Larry Downes, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
• Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
• Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
• Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
• David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some are So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998).
• Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
• Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
• Nathan Rosenberg and L. E.. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
• Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976, 1994).

I recently posted an essay over at The Bridge about “The Pacing Problem and the Future of Technology Regulation.” In it, I explain why the pacing problem—the notion that technological innovation is increasingly outpacing the ability of laws and regulations to keep up—“is becoming the great equalizer in debates over technological governance because it forces governments to rethink their approach to the regulation of many sectors and technologies.”

In this follow-up article, I wanted to expand upon some of the themes developed in that essay and discuss how they relate to two other important concepts: the “Collingridge Dilemma” and technological determinism. In doing so, I will build on material that is included in a forthcoming law review article I have co-authored with Jennifer Skees, Ryan Hagemann (“Soft Law for Hard Problems: The Governance of Emerging Technologies in an Uncertain Future”) as well as a book I am finishing up on the growth of “evasive entrepreneurialism” and “technological civil disobedience.”

Recapping the Nature of the Pacing Problem

First, let us quickly recap that nature of “the pacing problem.” I believe Larry Downes did the best job explaining the “problem” in his 2009 book on The Laws of Disruption. Downes argued that “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally” and that this “law” was becoming “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life.”

Downes was generally a cheerleader for such developments. For him, the pacing problem is more like the pacing benefit. But Downes is in the minority among most tech policy scholars in this regard. In the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), discussions about the pacing problem and what to do about it are omnipresent and full of foreboding gloominess.

STS is a broad field of interdisciplinary studies unified by a concern with “the impacts and control of science and technology, with particular focus on the risks, benefits and opportunities that S&T may pose” to a wide range of values. STS studies incorporates many disciplines: legal and philosophical studies, sociology, anthropology, engineering, and others. In countless essays, papers, journal articles, and books, STS scholars lament the pacing problem and often insist something must be done, often without ever getting around to explaining what that something is.

Regardless of their field of study, there is broad recognition among these scholars that new technological, social, and political realities make the pacing problem a phenomenon worth studying.  In my Bridge essay, I identified three primary drivers of the pacing problem:

• Technological driver: The power of “combinatorial innovation,” which is driven by “Moore’s Law,” fuels a constant expansion of technological capabilities.
• Social driver: As citizens quickly assimilate new tools into their daily lives and then expect that even more and better tools will be delivered tomorrow.
• Political driver: Government has grown increasingly dysfunctional and unable to adapt to those technological and social changes.

The “Collingridge Dilemma”

Although they do not always refer to it by name, STS scholars regularly stress the so-called “Collingridge dilemma” in their work. The Collingridge dilemma refers to the extreme difficulty of putting proverbial genies back in their bottles once a given technology has reached a certain inflection point in society. The concept is named after David Collingridge, who wrote about the challenges of governing emerging technologies in his 1980 book, The Social Control of Technology .

“The social consequences of a technology cannot be predicted early in the life of the technology,” Collingridge argued. “By the time undesirable consequences are discovered, however, the technology is often so much part of the whole economics and social fabric that its control is extremely difficult.” He called this the “dilemma of control,” and asserted that, “When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult and time-consuming.”

In a sense, the “Collingridge dilemma” is simply a restatement of the pacing problem but with (1) greater stress on the social drivers behind the pacing problem and, (2) an implicit solution to “the problem” in the form of preemptive control of new technologies while they are still young and more manageable.

Specifically, for many STS scholars, Collingridge’s “dilemma” is preferably solved through the application of the Precautionary Principle. The contours of the Precautionary Principle are notoriously murky and ill-defined. Nonetheless, as I discussed a great length in my last book on the subject, the Precautionary Principle generally refers to the belief that new innovations should be curtailed or disallowed until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harm to individuals, groups, specific entities, cultural norms, or various existing laws, norms, or traditions.

You can see the logic of the Collingridge dilemma and the Precautionary Principle at work everywhere in STS scholarship today. Few scholars want to admit they favor the Precautionary Principle, however, so they often use different terminology. “Anticipatory governance” or “upstream governance” are the preferred terms of art these days.

For example, in a recent law review article about “Regulating Disruptive Innovation,” Nathan Cortez argues that “new technologies can benefit from decisive, well-timed regulation” or even “early regulatory interventions.” Similarly, writing in Slate in 2014, John Frank Weaver insisted we should regulate emerging tech like artificial intelligence “early and often” to “get out ahead of” various social and economic concerns.

In his last book, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping beyond Our Control, bioethicist Wendell Wallach also argued for new forms of upstream governance and defined it as a system that allow for “more control over the way that potentially harmful technologies are developed or introduced into the larger society. Upstream management is certainly better than introducing regulations downstream, after a technology is deeply entrenched, or something major has already gone wrong,” he argued. Wallach is basically just restating the Collingridge dilemma in this regard.

The problem with all these calls for the anticipatory or upstream governance solutions to the pacing problem and the Collingridge dilemma is that, like the Precautionary Principle more generally, the specific solutions are very incoherent or sometimes completely lacking. STS scholars almost always leave the reader hanging without offering a conclusion to their gloomy, pessimistic narratives about whatever technology or technological process it is they are critiquing. Critics are quick to issue bold calls-to-action, but rarely provide a detailed blueprint.

There are some exceptions. Some STS scholars have advocated for Precautionary Principle-minded legislation or agencies, like an “Artificial Intelligence Development Act,” a “National Algorithmic Technology Safety Administration” or a federal AI agency, such as a “Federal Robotics Commission.” Meanwhile, over the past decade, many STS scholars have pushed for national privacy and cybersecurity legislation, or expansive new forms of liability for technology companies. The regulatory authority sought in these cases would be squarely precautionary in character, aimed at addressing a wide array of hypothetical harms through permissioned-based rulemaking before those problems even materialize.

Technological Determinism?

Discussions about the pacing problem and the Collingridge dilemma have an air of technological determinism to them. Technological determinism generally refers to the notion that technology almost has a mind of its own and that it will plow forward without much resistance from society or governments. Here is a more scholarly definition from Sally Wyatt, who has explained how technological determinism is generally defined in a two-part fashion:

The first part is that technological developments take place outside society, independently of social, economic, and political forces. New or improved products or ways of making things arise from the activities of inventors, engineers, and designers following an internal, technical logic that has nothing to do with social relationships. The more crucial second part is that technological change causes or determines social change.

The opposite of technological determinism is usually referred to as “social constructivism,” which as Thomas Hughes notes, “presumes that social and cultural forces determine technical change.”

Ironically, among STS scholars, technological determinist reasoning is both (a) regularly on display, and (b) generally reviled. That is, many STS scholars speaking in deterministic tones about the inevitability of certain technological developments, but then they effortlessly shift into social constructivist mode when commenting on what they hope to do about it.

One of the most well-known technology critics of the past century was French philosopher Jacques Ellul. It is impossible to read his tracts and not find deterministic reasoning flying off every other page. He argued, for example, that technology is “self-perpetuating, all-persuasive, and inescapable,” and that it represents “an autonomous and uncontrollable force that dehumanized all that it touches.” Moreover, within the field of Marxist studies, technological determinism is ubiquitous. Of course, that goes back to Marx himself and his many ideological descendants, who held strongly deterministic views about the role industrial technology played in sharping history and socio-political systems. Plenty of other STS scholars remain hard-core social constructivist, however, and insist that dealing with the pacing problem and the Collingridge dilemma really just comes down to a matter of sheer social and political willpower.

Techno-determinist thinking is usually on display in more vivid terms among technological optimists. Reading the writings of futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly, one cannot help but get the sense that they are pining for the day when we are all just assimilated into The Matrix. There is an air of utter futility associated with humanity’s efforts to resist the spread of various technological systems and processes. Philosopher Michael Sacasas refers to this mentality as “the Borg Complex,” which, he says, is often “exhibited by writers and pundits who explicitly assert or implicitly assume that resistance to technology is futile.”

The point I am trying to make here is that technological determinism is at work in all sorts of scholarship and punditry. Regardless of whether one subscribes to what Ian Barbour has labelled the warring viewpoints of “Technology as Liberator” or “Technology as a Threat,” very different people can hold strongly deterministic viewpoints.

Soft Determinism

The problem with all this talk about determinism—technological, social, political, or whatever—is that the lines are never quite as bright as some suggest. “Hard” determinism of any of these varieties simply cannot be correct. We have too many historical examples that run counter to both narratives.

Personally, I’ve always subscribed to what some refer to as “ soft technological determinism.” Technological historian Merritt Roe Smith defines “soft determinism” as the view “which holds that technological change drives social change but at the same time responds discriminatingly to social pressures,” as compared to “hard determinism,” which “perceives technological development as an autonomous force, completely independent of social constraints.”

Konstantinos Stylianou has offered a variant of soft determinism that zeroes in on better understanding the unique attributes of specific technologies and political systems when considering how difficult they may be to control. He argues that “there are indeed technologies so disruptive that by their very nature they cause a certain change regardless of other factors,” such as the Internet. Stylianou concludes that:

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 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.

That may sound like just more hard deterministic thinking, but it represents a softer variety that holds that the special characteristics of some technologies are indeed altering our capacity to govern many newer sectors using traditional regulatory mechanisms. In my new law review article with Jennifer Skees and Ryan Hagemann, we conclude that this is the key factor motivating the gradual move away from “hard law” and toward “soft law” governance tools for a great many emerging technologies.

To be clear, this does not mean we are going to soon reach the proverbial “end of politics” or the “death of the nation-state” due to technology, or anything like that. As I point out in my forthcoming book, that sort of talk is silly. Some technology enthusiasts or libertarians use techno-determinist talk as if they are preaching a gospel of liberation theology—liberation from the state through technology emancipation, that is.

In reality, technology giveth and technology taketh away. Technology can empower people and institutions and help them challenge laws, regulations, and entire political systems. My forthcoming book documents how many “evasive entrepreneurs” are doing just that today, and with increasing regularity. But technology empowers government actors, too. In an unpublished 2009 manuscript entitled, “Does Technology Drive the Growth of Government?” my Mercatus Center colleague Tyler Cowen noted how growth of big government in the 20th century was greatly facilitated by various modern technologies (advanced transportation and communications networks, in particular). “Future technologies may either increase or decrease the role of government in society,” he noted, “but if history shows one thing, it is that we should not neglect technology in understanding the shift from an old political equilibrium to a new one.”

Thus, those who think that the pacing problem is a one-way ratchet to emancipation from state control need to realize that technology can be used for good and bad ends, and it can be used (and abused) by governments to expand their powers and limit our liberties. Similarly, those tech critics and STS scholars who lament how the pacing problem will undermine governments, democracy, or other institutions or values without radical interventions also are going too far. They need to recognize that while it is true many new technologies will march forward at a steady clip, it does not mean that society is powerless to bring some order to technological processes. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. And then we create still more tools to improve upon previous tools, and the process goes on and on.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid put it best in this 2001 essay responding to “doom-and-gloom technofuturists”:

[T]echnological 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 . . . is to see beyond the hype and past the over-simplifications to the full import of these new sociotechnical formations.

So yes, the pacing problem is real, and it will continue to raise problems for social and political systems. But as Brown and Paul Duguid suggest, we’ll constantly adapt, form and reform new dynamic equilibriums, and then “muddle through,” just as we have so many times before.

Related Reading

• “The Pacing Problem and the Future of Technology Regulation”
• “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change”
• “A Short Response to Michael Sacasas on Advice for Tech Writers”
• “Are “Permissionless Innovation” and “Responsible Innovation” Compatible?”
• “Wendell Wallach on the Challenge of Engineering Better Technology Ethics”
• “Book Review: Calestous Juma’s “Innovation and Its Enemies’”
• “Evasive Entrepreneurialism and Technological Civil Disobedience: Basic Definitions”

As noted here last week, as part of their Marginal Revolution University online courses, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have been rolling out several classes on “Economics of the Media.” I think TLF readers will be interested in checking out their lessons on “Bundling” and “Cable TV Regulation” since these are topics we have frequently discussed here over the years. I’ve embedded those two presentations below, but please go the MRU site and watch all the videos in their media economics course when you get a chance. They are excellent.

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

______

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?”

I recently finished Tyler Cowen’s latest book, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.  Like everything he writes, this book is worth reading and it will be of interest to those who follow technology policy debates since Cowen makes a passionate case for “Internet optimism” in the face of recent criticisms of the Internet and the Information Age in general.

Cowen is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the co-author, along with Alex Tabarrok, of the wonderful  MarginalRevolution.com blog.  And if you haven’t read Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture, stop what you’re doing and go get yourself a copy right now. Brilliant book.  Compared to that book, Create Your Own Economy is a difficult book to summarize.  Seriously, this book is all over the place… but in a good way.  Even though it sometimes feels like “Tyler’s Miscellaneous Ramblings,” those ramblings will keep you engaged and entertained.  Cord Blomquist did a pretty good job of summarizing the general themes of the book in this post two months ago when he noted that, “despite cultural reflexes that would have us do otherwise, we should embrace… new technologies as means to be more selective about what information we absorb and therefore welcome the increased volume of bytes into our lives.  In his new book, [Cowen] explores technology as a vehicle to help you determine what you really value, not a series of a email-powered torture devices.”  That’s a pretty good summation, but the book is about much more than that.

Instead of a full-blown review, I want to focus on some of passages from Cowen’s book about coping with information overload, which I think readers here might find of interest. In doing so, I will contrast Cowen’s views with those of John Freeman, who just penned “A Manifesto for Slow Communication” in The Wall Street Journal. As we will see, Cowen and Freeman’s differences exemplify the heated ongoing debate taking place among “Internet optimists &  pessimists,” which I have discussed here many times before.  

My favorite chapter of Cowen’s book is entitled, “Why Modern Culture is Like Marriage, In All Its Glory.”  In it, Cowen takes on those who claim citizens are now being overwhelmed by a deluge of digital information, or are suffering from “information overload.”  In particular, Cowen addresses criticisms such as those leveled by social critics like Nick Carr, who penned a widely-read Atlantic article last year entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  Cowen responds:

[Carr] missed how people can construct wisdom — and long-term dramatic interest in their own self-education–from accumulating, collecting, and ordering small bits of information. What we’re growing impatient with is bits that are fed to us and that we really do not want. Contrary to Carr, we still have a long attention span when it comes to the broader picture, and if anything Google lengthens our attention span by allowing us to follow the same story over many years’ time. (p. 54)

Additionally, Cowen points out, search tools like Google and other information gathering and processing technologies actually “lengthens our attention spans in another way, namely by allowing greater specialization of knowledge”:

We don’t have to spend as much time looking up various facts and we can focus on the particular areas of interest, if only because general knowledge is so readily available.  It’s never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project, yet without losing touch with the world around you. As for information overload, it is you who chooses how much “stuff” you want to experience and how many small bits you want to put together. […]  The quantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the quality of our filters. (p. 55)

This is an important point and one made previously by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail. I was a bit surprised that Cowen failed to reference him on this point.  Anderson defined filters as “the catch-all phrase for recommendations and all the other tools that help you find quality in the Long Tail” and noted that “these technologies and services sift through a vast array of choices to present you with the ones that are most right for you.” (p. 108 of 2006 hardback edition)  “The job of filters is to screen out [the] noise” (p. 115) or all the information clutter (crap?) that is out there.

Cowen argues that the filtering technologies are getting better at this sifting and processing process, but so too are humans, he says.  The key to this, he argues, is that we are getting better are “ordering” information.  And something real exciting (other might say scary!) is happening to us:

Fundamentally the relationship between human minds and human cultures is changing. … There is quite literally a new plane for organizing human thoughts and feelings and we are jumping on these opportunities at an unprecedented pace.  (p. 9)  […] For a typical person, you encounter the web, and you feel overwhelmed, but you figure out how to impose some local coherence in your own way, if only by using Google search or going to your “favorite places” bookmarks.  You resort to some mental ordering, usually with the aid of technology. At first you’re just struggling to keep up, but the more time you spend on the web, the more you are in control. You move from bookmarks to Facebook to Twitter and then to hyper-specialized sites for ordering the details of your life. You move from bewilderment to a sense of increasing mastery. Economists have studies our species as homo economicus, and a few decades ago, when social science colleagues investigated our game-playing nature, homo ludens was born. Today a new kind of person creates his or her very own economy in his or her head.  The age of homo ordo is upon us. (p. 13)

Cowen is firmly aligning himself with what I have referred to as the “Internet Optimist” school of thinking.  As I pointed out in my “Internet Optimists vs. Internet Pessimists” essay last September, recent commentators on the impact of Internet on culture and economics tend to fall into one of these two camps.  There’s very little middle ground.

The optimists argue that the Internet and Information Age are improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order.  Even if some norms and institutions are being forced to adapt or disappear, that’s a small price to pay for the amazing advancements that the Internet has brought us.  The Internet pessimists see things quite differently.  Net skeptics such as the late Neil Postman, Carr, Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel, and Mark Helprin have argued that the Internet is destroying popular culture and professional media, that it is calling “truth” and “authority” into question by over-glamorizing amateurism and user-generated content, and that increased personalization and customization is damaging deliberative democracy by leading to homogenization, close-mindedness, and an online echo-chamber. Here’s the chart I used in a previous essay to highlight the differences between these two camps:

Now joining the ranks of the skeptics is John Freeman, the acting editor of Granta magazine and the author of the forthcoming book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, which is due out in October.  As mentioned above, an excerpt from the book appeared in weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. In that essay, Freeman makes an eloquent case that we should all take a collective pause and consider what the Internet and all this information and digital gadgetry means for life and how we live it:

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per­sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, work­place meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur. 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. Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements—it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the mani­festo of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world…

I take Freeman at his word that he is not out to pen a Luddite manifesto and I very much  look forward to reading his book.  I do hope he makes a better case than some other Internet skeptics — especially Keen, Siegel, and Helprin — who have unfortunately crossed that Luddite line with their tedious, anti-all-things-digital screeds.  Simply stated, the pessimists need a better spokesman.  They raise valid concerns that deserve to be taken seriously and yet it is extremely difficult to take them seriously when they persist in their seeming outright hostility to almost all technological change. The skeptics need a more balanced, less fanatical approach to addressing concerns about the Information Age and information overload.  I hope Mr. Freeman can provide it.  I look forward to his book to see if he has.

Nonetheless, I generally side with Cowen and the Internet optimists — at least when it comes to concerns about information overload.  I guess I have have a bit more faith in humans than the pessimists do. We humans adapt. We learn to cope. We’re actually pretty good at it, too. It’s not like this is the first social or technological revolution we’ve lived through, after all.  In fact, one could make a good case that many previous revolutions were far more jarring than our modern Digital Revolution.

Of course, that’s not to say that change can’t be gut-wrenching and destructive — of both economies and cultures. When I engage in debate with conservative-minded friends about the supposed destructive influences of new forms of pop culture (rock-and-roll or video games, for example), I don’t deny that new media and communications technologies alter culture and behavior in many ways, some negative. But, again, we adapt and learn to cope. The world goes on. It doesn’t get better in every way, but it does in most. I love industrial rock music and violent video games.  Am I a bad person? An uniformed one?  Well, guess what… there are millions out there like me who are getting along just fine, raising a family, holding down steady work, and being good little community citizens.  Perhaps I would swear less if I didn’t grow up listening to punk rock. Then again, my dad and his dad hated all forms of rock music but swore like sailors with their pants on fire.

Regardless, even if you align with the skeptics and believe that, on balance, things (speech, culture, communications, or whatever else) are getting worse because of the Internet and digital media, it begs the obvious questions: What, exactly do you want to do about it?  While I can appreciate the concerns raised by social and technological critics such as Mr. Freeman, they rarely seem to be willing to explain how far they would go to reverse whatever problem it is they have identified.  As Ben Casnocha pointed out in this excellent review of Tyler Cowen’s book, which appeared in The American:

The factor most in Cowen’s favor is the wind at the backs of all techno-optimists like his brethren Clay Shirky and Don Tapscott: 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.

I generally agree with Mr. Casnocha except I would argue that, at least in theory, it would be possible to turn back the clock with repressive enough means.  About the closest that any of the Internet pessimists ever came to explaining what that might mean in practice was this 2007 article by Andrew Keen in Advertising Age in which he claimed that the only way to save traditional media outlets and their advertising support mechanisms was to “re-create media scarcity”:

That means less user-generated content and more professionally created information and entertainment, less technology and more creativity. The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.

One wonders, how we go about “re-creating scarcity” in this sense. Who exactly brings in the regulatory wrecking ball and starts tearing down digital abundance?  And is that really a sensible solution?  Instead of calling for solutions that would be both intrusive and destructive, can’t we embrace the best of the modern digital age and try to temper its worst elements using other means?

The problem with the Internet optimists, by contrast, is that they only tend to see the upside of the Information Age. They sometimes fall into the trap of being pollyannas who look out at the unfolding landscape and see only rainbows in the air. Optimists need to place technological progress in context and appreciate that, as Neil Postman argued in Technopoly, there are some moral dimensions to technological progress that deserve attention. For example, if Cowen is correct that “the age of homo ordo is upon us” and we humans are now engaging in unprecedented amount of sorting, organizing, categorizing, and so on, is that entirely salubrious? Or, as the pessimists suggest, might there be downsides to that development worth exploring?

But the pessimists need to refocus their concerns and criticisms into more level-headed, practical prescriptions instead of going off the Luddite deep-end with talk of “re-creating scarcity” or “destroying the machine,” as Siegel and Helprin say.  Toward that end, I like a lot of the advice that John Freeman offers in closing of  his essay:

We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from effi­ciency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.

At times, I have talked here about my attempts to strike a more sensible balance between my online and offline lives. After my two kids were born, I became acutely aware of the need to take more “digital sabbaticals” or a weekly “technology Sabbath.”  I now try to find specific moments each day to shut the lid on my laptop, toss my mobile phone in the drawer, and turn off all my other digital gizmos and gadgets and just go do something terribly old-fashion or archaic.  Alas, the struggle continues. Even when I swear off digital gadgets or connectivity for a few hours, I still find myself sneaking a peak at e-mail traffic piling up on my phone.

In closing, as an information historian, I find this debate between the Internet optimists and pessimists incredibly interesting. Indeed, we can trace the intellectual roots of this struggle all the way back to the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word and the great debate between the god Theuth and King Thamus. When Theuth 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.” (Of course, I’d like to think that Theuth got the better of that one!)

And so the great debate about the impact of technological change on culture, learning, and morality continues.  And don’t expect it to ever end.  Just wait till virtual reality technology goes mainstream!  Oh my, that’s going to bring out a whole new batch of Theuthian technophiles and Thamusian technophobes.  And I greatly look forward to the discussion.

P.S. I have a lengthy article in the works entitled, ” Theuth, Thamus & the Great Debate over Technology & Culture,” and I’m currently looking for a publisher.  If anyone out there is interested, please let me know!  It will build on what I have said in this essay as well as those below:

• Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists
• The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed
• Book Review: Nick Carr’s Big Switch
• Book Review: Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine
• 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
• Book Review: Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin
• Review of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com (in Regulation magazine)

In April 2008, L. Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, launched his “Information Age” column with a brilliant piece entitled “Optimism and the Digital World” (which Adam lauded here). Crovitz noted the problem of “information overload,” then creeping into the public consciousness, but was unabashed in his optimism:

My own bias is that as information becomes more accessible, individuals gain choice, control and freedom. Established institutions – governments, large companies and special-interest groups – need to work harder to justify their authority. As information and knowledge spread, financial and human capital become more global and more competitive. The uncertainties and dislocations from new technology can be wrenching, but genies don’t go back into bottles. The First Law of Technology says that “with every change in technology that affects consumer behavior, we always overestimate the impact in the short term, but then underestimate the full impact over the long term.”

Crovitz picks up where he left off in today’s column: “Information Overload? Relax:  We survived copy machines. We’ll survive Twitter.”

Our era in the information age is a transition period of learning how to navigate information abundance. Rather than pitch our BlackBerrys and iPhones into the sea, imagine the benefits once we have figured out how to manage the chaos of endless data and routine multitasking, a process that will help refine our judgment about information and refocus our attention on what’s truly important…. Humans adapt, so we’ll learn how to live with information overabundance. Young people growing up multitasking are already less anxious about using technology and may well cope better than those of us in older generations. They have no choice but to get more sophisticated at separating the important from the unimportant and the authoritative from the unreliable, even while sampling from among many new kinds of information tools… Young people will cope first as we all evolve to become more sophisticated, less anxious users of information.

Crovitz also notes, with approval, GMU economist Tyler Cowen’s new book, “Create Your Own Economy,” which Cord blogged about here. I recently heard Cowen talk about the book and thoroughly enjoyed the talk.