The Myth of Technological Neutrality
October 1, 2024
The status of crank is rarely remitted in the span of ten years, but that is what has happened to me. I spent two decades, from 1999 to 2019, in New York City, where I watched social media and smartphones change the early adopters. My reading of Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan convinced me that “the myth of technological neutrality” was just that. In conversations with friends, often somewhere downtown, I disputed the view that these technologies merely added technical capacities to our lives. They exerted a negative spiritual, cultural, and political effect. They were superseding better ways of being and acting, while empowering certain groups over others. I argued that the first question about any technology was what kind of people it made us into. I convinced basically no one.
Today, the Institute for Family Studies, of which I am executive director, is a leader in efforts to require age verification for social media platforms and pornography sites, as well as to weaken the hold of smartphones over the lives of kids. In August 2022, with our friends at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, we released a policy brief calling for legislative action on these matters. Two years later, we have witnessed more than a dozen state laws, including one that received a governor’s signature only nine months after publication. My colleagues and I would be happy to credit ourselves for this short interval from white paper to law. But I believe that it heralds something far more momentous: The days of deference to Big Tech are ending.
