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By Root 1791 0

breaking a window; it all depends on who is looking and why. 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 those of its socially harmful uses, estimate which uses are most likely to prevail, and, finally, decide whether any mitigating laws and policies should be established to amplify or dampen some of the ensuing effects. On paper, nuclear technology is beautiful, complex, safe, and brilliantly designed; in reality, it has one peculiar “affordance” that most societies cannot afford, or at least they cannot afford it without significant safeguards.

Similarly, the reason why most schools ban their students from carrying knives is because this behavior could lead to bloodshed. That we do not know how exactly knives will be used in the hands of young people in every particular situation is not a strong enough reason to allow them; knowing how they can be misused, on the other hand, even if the chance of misuse is small, provides us with enough information to craft a restricting policy. Thus, most societies want to avoid some of the affordances of knives (such as their ability to hurt people) in certain contexts (such as schools).

The main problem with the “technology is neutral” thesis, therefore, is its complete uselessness for the purposes of policymaking. It may offer a useful starting point for some academic work in design, but it simply doesn’t provide any foundation for sensible policymaking, which is often all about finding the right balance between competing goods in particular contexts. If technology is neutral and its social effects are unknowable—it all depends on who uses it and when—it appears that policymakers and citizens can do painfully little about controlling it. The misuses of some simple technologies, however, are so widespread and easy to grasp that their undesirability in certain contexts is nothing short of obvious; it’s hard to imagine anyone making the case that knives are merely tools, open to both noble and nefarious contexts, at a PTA meeting. But when it comes to more complex technologies—and especially the Internet, with its plethora of applications—their conditional undesirability becomes far less obvious, save, perhaps, for highly sensitive issues (e.g., children gaining access to online pornography).

The view that technology is neutral leaves policymakers with little to do but scrutinize the social forces around technologies, not technologies themselves. Some might say that when it comes to the co-optation of the Internet by repressive regimes, one shouldn’t blame the Internet but only the dictators. This is not a responsible view either. Even those who argue that the logic of technology is malleable by the logic of society that adopts it don’t propose to stop paying attention to the former. Iran’s police may continue monitoring social networking sites forever, but it’s easy to imagine a world where Facebook offers better data protection to its users, thus making it harder for the police to learn more about Iranians on Facebook. Likewise, it’s easy to imagine a world where Facebook doesn’t change how much user data it discloses to the public without first soliciting explicit permission from the user.

Thus, one can believe that authoritarian regimes will continue being avid users of the Internet, but one can make it hard for them to do so. The way forward is to clearly scrutinize both the logic of technology and the logic of society that adopts it; under no circumstances should we be giving technologies—whether it’s the Internet or mobile phones—a free pass on ethics. All too often the design of technologies simply conceals the ideologies and political agendas of their creators. This alone is a good enough reason to pay closer attention to whom they are most likely to benefit and hurt. That technologies may fail to achieve the objectives their proponents intended should not distract us from analyzing the desirability