In 2012, I wrote a post called In Defense of (a little) Elitism, which was naturally criticized by some in the tech-utopian world for being, y’know, elitist. The apparent good in this digital-age model — that it is populist — is also its own weakness when we look at results in various media. Most obviously, it doesn’t take more than ...
It is impossible to look at the landscape of America, at this burning city on a hill, and not weep. Or scream. Because this blog advocates the legal rights of creators (copyrights), and because those rights historically enjoy bipartisan support, I have tried to maintain a politically balanced tone when writing about most policy matters. That was a lot easier ...
About ten minutes after the world went into self-quarantine, and we all instantaneously became more dependent on internet platforms, you could almost hear the keyboards clacking, as various pundits raced to announce that the techlash is officially over. And that it never should have happened. For instance, Ryan Bourne of the libertarian CATO institute said as much. Writing on April 9 for The ...
Between the headline and the Share button. Access to credible, useful information could not be more essential than it is in the present moment. But as we are all presumably more attentive than ever to our social media feeds, we are correspondingly bombarded with more garbage content. This crisis is a perfect opportunity for trolls to ply their trade. Whether ...
According to a September 2019 story in the New York Times, the volume of online content described as “child sexual abuse material” grew from 3,000 reports in 1998 to 45 million in 2019. What used to be called “child pornography,” which was bad enough, needed a broader term to encompass material that increasingly contains photographic and video content depicting torture and ...
