[good_sir_ant]

It's really hard to say how our world will look in the coming decades...

On one hand, we have all this explosively liberating technology, cheap and powerful, that is changing the way we communicate and share information. On the other hand, you see the 'natural' result of all this power moving towards the individual: states and governments gripping tighter than ever to control it and maintain their elevated status.

It serves to illustrate how asinine our arguments over 'appropriate' speech are. The result of any kind of forced censorship is the same no matter what the content of the speech is : less freedom.

[erikb]

Is it really so hard? The technology we have mostly helps people to free themselves from non-US, non-western-European "oppressing" governments (so basically all their enemies get trouble with their population, and the population becomes more open to our culture and more dependent on our technology).

But inside our borders we become more and more dependent on the technology, have less and less insight into what is happening in this technology. Also increasing the power of forementioned US and western European governments.

The only thing maybe becoming a problem is the eastern hemisphere with China, Russia, S.Korea, Japan and Taiwan (if they decide to work together, but happy for us they are pretty much split in the middle).