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Technology & Freedom

The Texas Universcholastic League choose the following topic for students to debate in the Spring of 2001:

UIL Spring 2001 LD debate topic: "Resolved: Increased reliance on technology undermines the quality of life in America."

Technology: Good, Bad, Or...?

The Good...

Too Much Recreation and Entertainment Technology?
Thoughts on the Spring 2001 UIL technology topic by Gregory Rehmke. Click here for article.

The Foundation for Economic Education
Technology, Progress, and Freedom by Edward W. Younkins [from Ideas on Liberty, January, 2000]
Technology represents man's attempt to make life easier. Technological advances improve people's standard of living, increase leisure time, help eliminate poverty, and lead to a greater variety of products. Progress allows people more time to spend on higher level concerns such as character development, love, religion, and the perfection of one's soul....[click here for full text of article on www.fee.org web site.]

Technology and Happiness by Allan Levite
While surfing the Internet one day, I chanced upon an article by Jay Hanson, titled "The Woes of Modern Society."1 In most respects it was standard environmentalist fare, bemoaning modern technology and the harm it has allegedly done to the earth and to humanity. Other writers have already dealt at length with the exaggerations and misstatements of the "green" movement,2 but Hanson has touched on a more philosophic issue that I want to address specifically-namely, the relationship between technology, affluence, and human happiness.... [Click for link to full article.]

Dynamist.com
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress by Virginia Postrel. Click here for more information on this book on the dynamist.com web site. Also of interest on influence of technology on quality of life is Virginia Postrel's speech at Camden Technology Conference: Dynamism, Stasis, and Popular Culture [click here for full text].

Cato Institute
It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon [Click for link to information on book at Cato web site].

Technology and Society 2000: The New Entertainment Era
A Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference. [Click here for conference articles and more information.]

Reason Foundation
Technology = Freedom? by Virginia I. Postrel
Is information technology inherently liberating? Is it true, as George Gilder proclaimed in this magazine in February, that Moore's Law "means that all of the monopolies and hierarchies and pyramids and power grids of industrial society are going to dissolve"? Or, as Tom Peters said in the same issue, that "governments are becoming irrelevant"? ... [Click here for full text of article from Reason Online]

WE, SPY: The ruinous effects of outlawing technologies by Brian Doherty
The federal government's recent crackdown on "spy stores" that sell such wares as tie tacks, smoke detectors, and teddy bears containing video cameras, spray cans that temporarily make enve lopes transparent, and other surveillance paraphernalia, could be cheered as a blow for the right to privacy. After all, many of those items' primary use seems to be to peep in on people without their consent or knowledge. [Click here for full text of article from Reason Online]

Word Wars by Charles Paul Freund
Why was Postman's own vision so myopic? Because he committed the original sin of the Western intelligentsia: He condemned technology as a threat to culture. In fact, technology is a conduit for culture, because it is a tool for expression and self-definition. Older forms of expression are not displaced by new ones; they are re-defined and usually amplified by them. [Click here for full text of article.]

Competitive Enterprise Institute
The Mythology of Science and Technology: Prometheus or Science is in trouble by Fred L. Smith

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Highly recommended is Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Economist Michael Cox book Myths of Rich and Poor. In this book Cox and his co-author survey the results of technological advances in recent decades. Their research shows the astonishing gains in free-time and quality of life that free-market policies and innovative technology have provided to Americans of all income levels. [Click here for more information on Myths of Rich and Poor on Laissez-Faire Books web site]

Review of Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We're Better Off Than We Think by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm. Basic Books • 1999 • 256 pages
Review by Donald Boudreaux, President of FEE. [Click here for full review on fee.org web site.]

Also of interest is recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas:
Technology section of Dallas Fed web site

Agriculture, Technology and the Economy

The Bad...

Is Technology Killing Leisure Time? Posted by JonKatz on Tuesday July 11, @10:30AM
New surveys suggest that ubiquitous technological tools are killing off leisure time, especially for younger workers and students -- that would be you -- who are working longer hours, taking fewer and shorter vacations (when they do go away, they take their cells, Palms and laptops along) and say they are more stressed than any other segment of the population. Opportunistic employers aren't helping, actually encouraging employees to do personal chores on the Net -- from their desks. Wasn't technology supposed to free us from workplace shackles? [click here for full article on slashdot.com]

Comlaints about reliance on technologies (from a pro-technology advocate):
"My greatest complaint about technology... loss of connection with the outdoors... it's effect on making humanity more and more timid and apt to value security over freedom (Greg Benson gave a great talk on this at a Cato Conference a few years ago)... loss of amateur musicians, artists, etc. so called-for and essential in Jane Austen's area." from Solveig Singleton, Competitive Enterprise Institute

Information poisoning by Caleb Carr (from salon.com)
It is my belief, for which I offer no apology, that most of that technology is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information, of arcane minutia, without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge -- such integration being the only function that distinguishes the human brain from a mechanical computer. [Click here for full text of article on Salon.com]

Losing our Souls to Technology?
See Daniel Chandler's online review on concerns about mankinds reliance on technology in film and literature: Imagining Futures, Dramatizing Fears

Or...

Ira Levin's great dystopian novel This Perfect Day shows a society overly dependent on technology. But the technology itself in Levin's dystopia is no more evil than is innovative technology in America today good. Technology, whether a gun, machine or drug can be put to good ends or bad. A gun can be used to defend a person from assault, or it can be used to assault others. Drugs can be used to destroy parasites, or to turn energetic young people into servile tools of the state. Technology itself is amoral. People can use technological tools to create wealth or to destroy it.

This Perfect Hell by Ralph Raico
This Perfect Day belongs to the genre of "dystopian" or anti-utopian novels, like Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. Yet it is more satisfying than either. Not only is its futuristic technology more plausible (computers, of course), but the extrapolation of the dominant ideology of the end of the twentieth century is entirely convincing. ... [Click to go to full text of article.]