Status Updates From The Net Delusion: The Dark ...

After all, it's not historians of technology but futurists - those who prefer to fantasize about the bright but unknowable future rather than confront the dark but knowable past - that make the most outrageous claims about the fundamental, world-transforming significance of any new technology, especially if it is already on its way to making the cover of Time magazine.

The technologists, especially technology visionaries who invariably pop up to explain technology to the wider public, "largely extrapolate from today or tomorrow while showing painfully limited interest in the past," as Howard Segal, another historian of technology, once mused. This, perhaps, explains the inevitable barrage of utopian claims every time a new invention comes along.

Not surprisingly, the dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation.

Another problem with technological fixes is that they usually rely on extremely sophisticated solutions that cannot be easily understood by laypeople. The claims of their advocates are, thus, almost impenetrable to external scrutiny, while their ambitious promise — the elimination of some deeply entrenched social ill — makes such scrutiny, even if it is possible, hard to mount.

Product designers like to think of tools as having certain perceived qualities. Usually called "affordances", these qualities suggest - rather than dictate - how tools are to be used. The fact that a given technology has multiple affordances and is open to multiple uses though, does not obviate the need to closely examine its ethical constitution, compare the effects of its socially beneficial uses with harmful ones.

"Joseph Goebbels, who put radio to masterful propaganda use in Hitler's Germany, saw its logic in very different terms than, say, Marconi. Thus, knowing everything about a given technology still tells us little about how exactly it will shape a complex modern society."

"The British made a key strategic decision to prioritize public broadcasting and created a behe- moth known as the British Broadcasting Corporation; the Americans, for a number of cultural and business reasons, took a more laissez-faire approach."

But it is not the limitations of technology that are to blame. Rather, it was the limitations of the political, cultural, and regulatory discourse of the time that soon turned much of American television into, as the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow, put it in 1961, a "vast wasteland."

That criticism of technology is as old as its worship shouldn't lead us to conclude that attempts to minimize the adverse effects of technology on society (and vice versa) are futile. Instead, policymakers need to acquaint themselves with the history of technology so as to judge when the overhyped claims about technology's potential may need some more scrutiny-if only to ensure that at least half of them get realized

"Hoping that simply opening up all the networks and uploading all the documents would make a transition to democracy easier or more likely is just an illusion. If the sad experience of the 1990s has taught us anything, it's that successful transitions require a strong state and a relatively orderly public life. The Internet, so far, has posed a major threat to both."

"Perhaps, the freedom to connect, at least in its current somewhat abstract interpretation, would be a great policy priority in a democratic paradise, where citizens have long forgotten about hate, culture wars, and ethnic prejudice. But such an oasis of tolerance simply does not exist."

"A brief look at history-for example, at the politics of Weimar Germany, where increased civic engagement helped to delegitimize parliamentary democracy—would reveal that an increase in civic activity does not necessarily deepen democracy."

To assume that all political regimes can be mapped somewhere on an Orwell-Huxley spectrum is an open invitation to simplification; to assume that a government would be choosing between reading their citizens' mail or feeding them with cheap entertainment is to lose sight of the possibility that a smart regime may be doing both.

Under the pressure of globalization, authoritarianism has become extremely accommodating.

While we thought the Internet might give us a generation of digital renegades, it may have given us a generation of digital captives, who know how to find comfort online, whatever the political realities of the physical world. For these captives, online entertainment seems to be a much stronger attractor than reports documenting human rights abuses by their governments - much like their peers in the democratic West.