NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital here. These sections on Regulation and Self-Regulation follow the one on Optimism to make clear my belief that technology will not automatically makes things better but that we have to work at that.
Regulation
There are many people who work in technology and investing who are optimists and believe in progress. Among those there is a subset, myself included, who also believe in the need for regulation. There is another group though that has a decidedly libertarian streak and would like for government to just get out of the way.
The history of technological progress is one of changes in social norms and political regulations. For instance, at the moment much of the world gets around by driving cars. The car was an important technological innovation in that it allowed for individual mobility. But it would have been impossible to have widespread adoption of cars without regulation. We needed to agree on rules of the road and we also needed to build roads. Neither of these could have been accomplished based solely on individual choices. Roads and their rules are examples of natural monopolies: you don’t want to have multiple disjointed road networks or different sets of rules of the road (imagine some people driving on the left side and others on the right). Natural monopolies are classic examples of market failure that require regulation. The car would also not have made much sense as individual transport without changes in social norms, such as making it acceptable for women to operate a car (a change that did not take place in Saudi Arabia until the end of 2017 [19]).
Not all regulation will be good regulation. In fact, the earliest regulation of automotive vehicles was aimed at delaying their adoption by limiting their speed to that of a horse drawn carriage and in some cases even requiring them to be preceded by someone carrying a flag [20].
Similarly, not all regulation of digital technology will be good regulation. Much of it will initially aim to protect the status quo and help incumbent enterprises, such as the recently enacted changes to net neutrality rules [21]. But that is no reason to call for an absence of regulation. It should be seen, instead, as a challenge to come up with the right regulation as we did eventually in the case of cars.
My proposals for regulation later in the book are aimed at being pro-innovation by giving more economic freedom to individuals and by giving them better access to information (informational freedom). These regulations are choices we need to make collectively. They represent a big departure from the past aimed at letting us explore the space of the possible opened up by digital technologies so that we can transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age.
Self-Regulation
There is another set of choices we need to make individually. These have to do with how we react to the massive acceleration of information dissemination and knowledge creation made possible by digital technology. These are not rules society can or should impose because they relate to our inner mental states.
For instance, there are a lot of people at the moment who feel offended by content that is available on the Internet. People are yelling, insulting and even threatening in comment threads and forums. Others spend all their time in polarized online communities being fed algorithmically curated information which confirms only their existing biases, in a phenomenon that has become known as a “filter bubble”. Even though some technology and regulation can help here, fundamentally overcoming these problems requires internal changes which I later describe in a section called psychological freedom.
Changing ourselves requires self-regulation. By this I mean training our capacity as individuals to use our rationality. From Eastern religions including Hinduism and Buddhism, to the Stoics in ancient Greece, there is a long tradition of understanding how we can get past our immediate emotional and heuristic brain responses. Much of this lines up well with what we have uncovered more recently about the workings of the human brain.
If we want to have true progress leveraging digital technologies, we need to get past our initial emotional responses and figure out how to maintain a rational dialog. Only then will our choices on where to go in the dramatically enlarged space of the possible be based on our critical thinking abilities.
Much of what I have been saying here about optimism, the potential for progress and the need for regulation and self-regulation could immediately be attacked as coming from the perspective of a white male venture investor living in the United States. As such it might be deemed a privileged view that I am attempting to impose on others.
The next chapter will argue instead that Humanism provides an objective foundation of values for this perspective that applies to all of humanity.
