I hope all readers answer “no” to the question above, but in policy recommendations, we often are told that the answer is “yes.” In particular, we are told that if technology makes something inevitable, we must all not just adjust to it but embrace it. Technology is about improvement, about bettering the world. Short-term disruptions — such as the evisceration of creators’ rights — will cede to a better tomorrow.

Having been snowbound the last few days, and finding the carriers for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have not been willing to risk breaking their necks to deliver me my newspapers, I have been forced to sit at the breakfast table in the morning with my coffee and my… MacBook. I feel like one of those pseudo-cool dudes who occupies a table at the local independent coffee haunt all morning doing important-looking typing on a laptop. I don’t want to feel like him.

First, back to the theme, then how my no-physical-newspaper experience ties in.

A technologist who understands these things better than me, Jaron Lanier, says “You Are Not a Gadget.” That is the title of his book, appropriately so. He explains how lovers of technology tend to over-romanticize it. He himself sees a brand-new software program as something beautiful, a short pristine bit of code capable of doing anything. (I looked at my newborns that way, so even Lanier is capable of a little romanticizing of inanimate objects).

Lanier then notes, however, that once the code begins to be modified to actually make something happen, several things occur: 1) That new code enabling one thing now makes it more difficult for that code to do something else. 2) That new code builds in a legacy system that will prove challenging in the future, when things yet unimagined are attempted with that code. 3) That new code actually inhibits future thinking on possibilities, causing software engineers to endure blinders based on the “law” of code that never should have been a law to begin with.

One lesson here is that technology is not good or evil, it just is. Some benefits can come from new technologies — it’s cool that my TiVo box can recognize my “watch instantly” list in my Netflix account and fire up TV shows and movies on my plasma TV in almost no time — but it is not inevitable that the advance in technology leads to an advance in well-being.

Take recorded music. There has been a lot of press lately about how teens are embracing vinyl. Nobody lives in music more than someone 14 to 25 years of age, nobody. When you live surrounded by recorded music, audio quality might matter to you. And nine out of ten audiophiles insist nothing sounds as “pure” as vinyl. (The tenth will disagree simply to be out of step with the mainstream, which is a naturally occurring trend with self-identified audiophiles.)

I’m not sophisticated enough to speak definitively on the subject of vinyl. I will say, however, that I’ve conducted tests on well-mixed music such as Pink Floyd. On CD, it sounds amazing. (I unfortunately no longer have any of my Floyd LPs, or a turntable for that matter.) On satellite radio, it still sounds good but a bit thin. On my MP3 player in MP3 format, it sounds like Roger Waters and the gang are performing in a sewer main. You can hear the compression.

Of course, vinyl doesn’t just sound great because of the medium. Albums put on vinyl tend to be professionally recorded, in a studio with great equipment and a skilled engineer. That costs money, sometimes serious money. But we’re told that in the digital age, it’s silly to charge for recorded music. It should be given away to promote live performances. Bands should use Garage Band on their Macs to record their music and upload it to the Internet to let anyone download at no cost.

Now to the newspaper. Yes, I love being able to pull up the latest headlines in a mobile-browser-friendly way when on the move. I love breaking news reports online that are stale by the time my newspaper hits my doorstep in the morning.

But I also love the experience of reading the paper. I can flip from page to page, choosing what to read, and choosing when to follow the “jump” or not. I can move through section by section, feeling confident I haven’t overlooked a link. My wife can read one section while I read another. And I can carry a section to the local coffee shop and sit next to the self-important guy occupying the table for hours with his small skim latte.

In other words, I have complete control over my news-consumption experience.

In the best of worlds, I have both a physical newspaper and online news. That is of course where we are now. But it is expensive to print and distribute newspapers, far more expensive than online. Technophiles tell us it’s silly to continue to deliver news the way it was delivered in the 1700s. So even if I as a consumer prefer the old model, even if I consider it more convenient and pleasurable, technology knows best. The newspaper must go.

I own a Kindle and love it but still read books. My fourteen-year-old daughter is no Luddite — I have to take her netbook away occasionally or she would spend 24 hours a day on Facebook and YouTube — but she mocks my Kindle, saying books should be read in paper form. That is the method of reading a novel she thinks is superior.

Would technophiles call her a Luddite? Some would. She doesn’t understand that technology knows best. The most efficient production and distribution method must be by definition the best.

Of course, it’s one thing to have a technologist evangelize the purity of technological advancement. It becomes amusing when you have tech policy advocates face this reality. They may not like all advancements in technology, for example, advancements in securing a copyright owner’s rights with a digital copy in a way that is consumer-friendly and invisible, or advancements in targeting infringement on an ISP’s network while not scooping in legal uses. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways.

We bought our first PC in 1983, an ugly IBM with two 5-1/4″ floppy drives and an amber monitor. I’ve lost track of how many computers I’ve worked with at home or at work since then. In the last 27 years, I have spent so many hours connecting peripherals, downloading software updates, running virus scans, and doing basic troublemaking, if I had those hours back, I could have written the Great American Novel. (Well, I could have written a novel, whether publishers or agents would consider it great is another matter.) If technological advancement is always superior, how to technologists explain the first version of Windows Vista? Sure sounds to me like Mr. Lanier’s software concerns above played a role in that less-than-success.

We need to recognize that technology doesn’t really care about how we live our lives. It will just do what it does, and what it is directed to do. Those directing it are not us. They may not place sound quality above storage size, or the ability to read a newspaper on the Metro over the efficiency of digital delivery.

So we, as humans and not devices, must not let technology decide who we are, or what our rights are.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 8:22 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, drm, internet, network neutrality, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.