Technology: How to Stop Innovation From Breaking America - by Tim Wu

America has long carried on a great love affair with technological progress. But the truth is that really big inventions—the printing press, the internal-combustion engine, the internet—have both upsides and downsides. They make new things possible, but they also tend to undo settled expectations and create chaos. The real question is not whether there will be major technological changes, but whether societies can learn to better handle the disruptions that follow.   

here is a lot to learn: Over the past 500 years, humanity has repeatedly blown it. Consider how things stood a century ago, in the early 20th century. People love to say that technology is changing faster today than ever before. But the 1890s through the 1920s witnessed changes far more dramatic than the birth of social media: the invention of airplanes, home electricity, radio broadcasting, tanks, and machine guns. That period and the period immediately after also witnessed terrible labor violence, the rise of totalitarianism, two depressions, two world wars, several genocides, and other mass killings of extraordinary volume. If these horrors were not exactly caused by the wondrous new technologies of the age, they were certainly aided and abetted by them.  

In all these cases, technological inventions were like catalysts, creating what chemists call rapid reactions and what laypeople call explosions. For example, military advances upended whatever deterrence equilibrium existed, giving some countries—Spain, Germany, Japan—reason to think they might overpower others.

Today’s most powerful nations don’t have the problem of Ming China. Instead, they have embraced the opposite orientation—extreme technophilia. America in particular is exceptionally forward-looking. We are always imagining utopian futures, believing that “the best is yet to come.” The phrase scientific progress has an almost talismanic allure to it, and calling someone “backward-looking” is an insult. As the social critic Neil Postman put it in 1992, we “gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.”     

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How to Stop Innovation From Breaking America - The Atlantic