Not really sure what I'm saying here

I don’t think it’s possible for humans to regulate themselves. Let me give a concrete example: I really believe, after being in several online chat rooms to which someone as a sort of sabotage or terrorism posted pornographic photos and videos of minors, that we are not ready for the internet. The technical means whereby we can regulate such matters are exceedingly primitive, and more often than not simply fall back on mass moderation by humans. That we are sick enough to consider such a thing an acceptable cost of the dubious benefits of the instrument proves my point.

But on the other hand, any technique can be disseminated by even a moderately small organization, which organizations, in the USA, typically are totally free to introduce whatever innovation they’d like, under the aegis of the free market. The problem here is not actually a technical one: it is the social problem of how we should design and modify that technical body of humanity (I don’t see any point in continuing to feel as if the Freudo-McLuhanian doctrine that techique is an extension of the human body is a claim that needs to be defended: it’s merely a metaphor for understanding something that nobody seems to care enough about to worry about). Given how long humans have been seeking to reform and regulate their societies and the extent to which these reforms have been unsatisfactory or impossible to generalize, it seems to me extraordinarily improbable that in this one case we should come to our senses and put down a toy that everyone wants.

There isn’t, I don’t think, anything to be done, calls for regulation, control, restraint — in short, calls to the name of the father or the superego — not withstanding. This is because such a move, to be effective, would have to be universally adopted by all humans as normative and as regulating even the most piddling of things, like the Erewhonians. Otherwise a mischievous team could simply do the thing everyone else had agreed not to do, and the thing would be done, irrespective of the restraint of the vast majority of humanity. Just once is enough to fuck it up for everyone.

If I don’t believe, really, in the Luddite approach of simply smashing the means of production to prevent their changing and overturning of previous social structures, then I also don’t believe in aimless capitulation to the will of others. I tend to have a long term view: consider that we have not even celebrated the centenary of the formalization of computation, nor the construction of the first universal computing machine, nor even less the appearance of massive computer networks nor their dissemination into society at large along with tinier and tinier interactive computers, the last events of which have occurred within living memory. In short, it’s early days yet, and I tend to think that things will continue to change.