[eszaq]

This doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. In the same way we have public defenders who professionally defend scoundrels, it seems good to have people who professionally critique new technologies.

I'm old enough to remember the naive optimism around the internet in the 2000s. "The long tail", "cognitive surplus", "one laptop per child", Creative Commons, the Arab "Spring", breathless Youtube videos about how social media is gonna revolutionize society for the better, etc. Hardly anyone forecasted clickbait, Trump tweets, revenge porn, crypto scams, or social media shaming. If we had a few professional critics who were incentivized to pour cold water on the whole deal, or at least scan the horizon for potential problems, maybe things would've turned out better.