If you follow the news very closely, you might have seen the titans of Silicon Valley in the Senate this week getting absolutely humiliated. Senator Josh Hawley made Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sheepishly get up and apologize to “the victims” — people whose children had pornographic photos distributed across his site and then took their own lives. Other senators reviewed the baleful studies showing that social-media apps on smartphones have been the primary cause of a spike in depression, anxiety, and other mental-health issues, especially among teenaged girls. It’s becoming more and more obvious that politicians want to regulate social media, and perhaps restrict it to people 16 years of age or older.
I always thought new technology was good, that whatever we would discover would mostly improve human life. Even the frightening stuff like nuclear weapons. You could at least make a case that the advent of such destructive weapons is tamping down the mechanized violence that flourished in the first half of the 20th century. This was a naïve view, but it’s the one that made optimism about “tech” at least plausible.
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