Or maybe the title should be, "Don't Be Naive."
Lauren Weinstein gave a pessimistic and sparsely attended talk at Google in January, and he's posted the mp4 video on his blog. I haven't seen it on Google Video yet, but Weinstein says he obtained the video master from Google.
Weinstein has been a steady and consistent voice since the early days of the Internet on the intersection of technology and society -- privacy, censorship, and freedom on the net being some of his favorite topics.
Anyone interested in recent issues of net neutrality, Internet surveillance, and censorship would get a lot from this one-hour discussion.
Weinstein's theme can be summed up as advice to Google to recognize that powerful forces that Google does not control in politics, society, and public perception can have a greater influence on Google's future than just trying to do the right thing. And these forces can and will (and in fact already are) using Google's creations for purposes that Google never intended.
According to Weinstein, because of the potential of Google's creations, the odds are against Google keeping control of the tools they've created.
It's not enough to say, "Don't Be Evil." You really want, if possible, to go to the next steps, and try to find ways to prevent evil, and to prevent others from doing evil with the marvels that you've created ...I agree that while Google has laudable objectives, that's not enough to keep their technology from being abused. And I'd add that by developing technology to actively and efficiently self-censor expression, Google has accelerated the abuse of their technology and diminished the one advantage they have in this struggle -- their reputation.
Technologists throughout history, for thousands of years, have seen what has happened to their tools in the wrong hands, when they were abused, and how difficult it is to control it. And more often than not, they failed in controlling it ...
But it's still worth a try. Sometimes you win, sometimes you succeed.
[via Philipp]