In software, the most beautiful code, the most beautiful functions, and the most beautiful programs are sometimes not there at all.
The Internet does matter, but we simply don’t know how it matters. This fact, paradoxically, only makes it matter even more: The costs of getting it wrong are tremendous.
Today’s battle is not between David and Goliath; it’s between David and David Letterman. 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.
Another recurring feature of modern technology that has been overlooked by many of its boosters is that the emergence of new technologies, no matter how revolutionary their circuitry might be, does not automatically dissolve old practices and traditions. Back in the 1950s, anyone arguing that television would strengthen existing religious institutions was inviting ridicule. And yet, a few decades later, it was television that Pat Robertson and a horde of other televangelists had to thank for their powerful social platform. Who today would bet that the Internet will undermine organized religion?
Today, aspiring digital revolutionaries can stay on their sofas forever—or until their iPads’ batteries run out—and still be seen as heroes. In this world, it doesn’t really matter if the cause they are fighting for is real or not; as long as it is easy to find, join, and interpret, that’s enough. And if it impresses their friends, it’s a true gem.
Fortunately, we are not alone on the Internet—at least one billion other users are also blogging, Googling, Facebooking, and tweeting—and most of our information is simply lost in the endless ocean of digital ephemera produced by others. This is what privacy scholars call “security by obscurity.
The first prerequisite to getting Internet freedom policy right is convincing its greatest advocates that the Internet is more important and disruptive than they have previously theorized.
Another recurring feature of modern technology that has been overlooked by many of its boosters is that the emergence of new technologies, no matter how revolutionary their circuitry might be, does not automatically dissolve old practices and traditions. Back in the 1950s, anyone arguing that television would strengthen existing religious institutions was inviting ridicule. And yet, a few decades later, it was television that Pat Robertson and a horde of other televangelists had to thank for their powerful social platform. Who today would bet that the Internet will undermine organized religion?
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