In the online world known as the "metaverse," there are many lines to be drawn and rules to be set. Continue reading to find out how humans and all of our flaws will fit into this new world. I was brought up and trained in the Internet Age by people who really believed that nation states were on the verge of crumbling…and we could geek around it. These people [and their nation states] were irrelevant. Ms. Crawford had a key tech role in the Obama Administration and is now a law professor.

How to Unplug from the World-Gobbling Machine One year ago, on March 19, 2020, I took a walk in my neighborhood park, seeking to clear my mind. The governor had declared a state of emergency 11 days ago in response to the WHO's pronouncement of a global coronavirus pandemic. In the week that followed, I voluntarily transferred my counseling practice to video-only sessions, doing my part to participate in the "two weeks to flatten the curve" campaign that had spread virally via social media and other means of internet delivery. After all, "We're all in this together," I thought. But during my first week of teletherapy sessions, a new, involuntary form of curve-flattening had begun to sweep the country, starting in the California Bay Area, in imitation of the Chinese and Italian lockdowns. Earlier that day the California Governor had extended this lockdown to cover the entire state by executive decree. It seemed only a matter of time before the Oregon Governor would follow suit (she did ...

Telecom companies are currently scrambling to implement fifth-generation cellular network technology. But the world of 5G is a world where all objects are wired and constantly communicating data to one another. The dark truth is that the development of 5G networks and the various networked products that they will give rise to in the global smart city infrastructure, represent the greatest threat to freedom in the history of humanity. STEVE MOLLONKOPF: 5G will upgrade the human experience at home and across industries as we connect virtually everything. By 2020, analysts estimate that there will be more than 20 billion installed IoT devices around the world, generating massive amounts of data. With access to this kind of information, industries of all kinds will be able to reach new levels of efficiency as they add products, services, and capabilities. As you may have heard by now, telecom companies are currently scrambling to implement fifth-generation cellular network technology.

In his 1955 short story Franchise, Isaac Asimov imagined how American democracy might be radically transformed by the digital age. In the story, set in 2008, Americans' political will is exercised not by individual citizens who stand in line to vote, but by a massive supercomputer--the Multivac--that processes an ocean of public data with inscrutable algorithms to reliably predict the outcome of this messy, partisan, costly, and all-too-corruptible process. The story works on many levels, but above all it evokes the technocrat's dream (or dystopian vision, depending on one's perspective) of using new technology to smooth out the wrinkles in our aging analog democracy. Today, those wrinkles are looking more and more like cracks, while new technologies--from social media and predictive search to digital surveillance--seem to be doing more to destabilize our fragile democratic institutions than to reinforce them. I suggest we look at why our newest digital tools--until recently, celebrated as bearers of a new age of democratic wisdom and civic health--have largely failed to deliver on those promises.