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of those original agendas. The Internet is no exception. The mash-up ethos of Web 2.0, whereby new applications can be easily built out of old ones, is just more proof that the Internet excels at generating affordances. There is nothing about it suggesting that all such affordances would be conducive to democratization. Each of them has to be evaluated on its own terms, not lumped under some mythical “tool neutrality.” Instead, we should be closely examining which of the newly created affordances are likely to have democracy-enhancing qualities and which are likely to have democracy-suppressing qualities. Only then will we be able to know which affordances we need to support and which ones we need to counter.

It’s inevitable that in many contexts, some of the affordances of the Web, like the ability to remain anonymous while posting sensitive information, could be interpreted both ways, for example, positively as a means of avoiding government censorship but also negatively as a means of producing effective propaganda or launching cyber-attacks. There will never be an easy solution to such predicaments. But then this is also the kind of complex issue that, instead of being glossed over or assumed to be immutable, should be addressed by democratic deliberation. Democracies run into such issues all the time. What seems undeniable, however, is that refusing to even think in terms of affordances and positing “tool neutrality” instead is not a particularly effective way to rein in some of technology’s excesses.

chapter eleven

The Wicked Fix

In 1966 the University of Chicago Magazine published a brief but extremely provocative essay by Alvin Weinberg, a prominent physicist and head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, once an important part of the Manhattan Project. Titled “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?” the essay, best described as an engineer’s cri de coeur, argued that “profound and infinitely complicated social problems” can be circumvented and reduced to simpler technological problems. The latter, in turn, can be solved by applying “quick technological fixes” to them, fixes that are “within the grasp of modern technology, and which would either eliminate the original social problem without requiring a change in the individual’s social attitudes, or would so alter the problem as to make its resolution more feasible.”

One of the reasons why the essay received so much attention was because Weinberg’s ultimate technological fix—the one that could end all wars—was the hydrogen bomb. As it “greatly increases the provocation that would precipitate large-scale war,” he argued, the Soviets would recognize its destructive power and hold considerably less militarist attitudes as a result. This was an interesting argument to make in 1966, and the essay still has relevance today. Weinberg’s fascination with “technological fixes” was largely the product of an engineer’s frustration with the other, invariably less tractable, and more controversial alternative of the day: social engineering. Social engineers, as opposed to technologists, tried to influence popular attitudes and social behavior of citizens through what nontechnologists refer to as “policy” but what Weinberg described as “social devices”: education, regulation, and a complicated mix of behavioral incentives.

Given that technology could help accomplish the same objectives more effectively, Weinberg believed that social engineering was too expensive and risky. It also helped that “technological fixes” required no profound changes in human behavior and were thus more reliable. If people are given to bouts of excessive drinking, Weinberg’s preferred response would be not to organize a public campaign to caution them to drink responsibly or impose heavier fines for drunk driving but to design a pill that would help to dampen the influence of the alcohol. Human nature was corrupt, and Weinberg’s solution was to simply accept this and work around it. Weinberg was under no illusion that he was eliminating the root causes of the problem; he knew that technological