The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [157]
No society has ever got such regulatory frameworks right by looking only at technology’s bright sides and refusing to investigate how its uses may also produce effects harmful to society. The problem with cyber-optimism is that it simply doesn’t provide useful intellectual grounds for regulation of any sort. If everything is so rosy, why even bother with regulation? Such an objection might have been valid in the early 1990s, when access to the Internet was limited to academics, who couldn’t possibly foresee why anyone would want to send spam. But as access to the Internet has been democratized, it has become obvious that self-regulation will not always be feasible given such a diverse set of users and uses.
Technology’s Double Life
If there is an overarching theme to modern technology it is that it defies the expectations of its creators, taking on functions and roles that were never intended at creation. David Noble, a prolific historian of modern technology, makes this point forcefully in his 1984 book Forces of Production . “Technology,” writes Noble, “leads a double life, one which conforms to the intentions of designers and interests of power and another which contradicts them—proceeding behind the backs of their architects to yield unintended consequences and unintended possibilities.” Even Ithiel de Sola Pool, that naïve believer in the power of information to undermine authoritarianism, was aware that technology alone is not enough to create desired political outcomes, writing that “technology shapes the structure of the battle but not every outcome.”
Not surprisingly, futurists often get it wrong. George Wise, a historian associated with General Electric, examined fifteen hundred technology predictions made between 1890 and 1940 by engineers, historians, and other scientists. One-third of those predictions came true, even if somewhat vaguely. The remaining two-thirds either were false or remained in ambiguity.
From a policy perspective, the lesson to be learned from the history of technology and the numerous attempts to foretell it is that few modern technologies are stable enough—in their design, in their applications, in their appeal to the public—to provide for flawless policy planning. This is particularly the case at the early stages of a technology’s life cycle. Anyone working on a “radio freedom” policy in the 1920s would have been greatly surprised by the developments—many of them negative—of the 1930s. The problem with today’s Internet is that it makes a rather poor companion to a policy planner. Too many stakeholders are involved, from national governments to transnational organizations like ICANN and from the United Nations to users of Internet services; certain technical parts of its architecture may change if it runs out of addresses; malign forces like spammers and cyber-criminals are constantly creating innovations of their own. Predicting the future of the Internet is a process marked by far greater complexity than predicting the future of television because the Web is a technology that can be put to so many different uses at such a cheap price.
It’s such essential unpredictably that should make one extremely suspicious of ambitious and yet utterly ambiguous policy initiatives like Internet freedom that demand a degree of stability and maturity that the Internet simply doesn’t have, while their advocates are making normative claims