IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 27

To quote a helpful response to
earlier drafts of this paper from
Ian McAuley:

in which the contributions of
the private market, the sharing
community, and the government are all respected.

The discipline is sufficiently
rich to allow us to analyze digital disruption and to suggest appropriate policies in
response. We can do this
using established economic
theory, without starting all
over again. Many of the issues
associated with digital disruption are covered in the
established theories of public goods, and more recent
developments in behavioral
economics and game theory,
for example.
The problem lies not with
economics itself, but with a
narrow branch of economics
embraced by our policymakers, broadly described as
neoliberalism...
... if the benefits of established and emerging technologies are to be realized, they
must be in the context of
inclusive growth. That's why
we need to abandon that
dead-end branch of neoliberalism, and to return to the economics of the mixed economy,

The quality and character of citizenship, of the art and practice of
belonging to a wider social community of mutual rights and responsibilities, is also up for contest. As
technology keeps expanding at least
the potential for more and better connectedness, transparency, access to
knowledge and power, and the ability to forge new bonds of solidarity
and common purpose, how people
respond is being tested. How do
these new tools and platforms make
the leap from instruments of protest
and new social movement building,
to platforms for the harder, contested
business of governing and decision
making with its complex trade-offs
and persistent ambiguities? How do
citizens activate their obligations and
their power to engage, influence and
shape, to be heard and accounted
to, in an era that seems to be sweating distrust and disengagement from
every institutional pore?

The World and the Web
It's at least an interesting thought
experiment to consider whether,

"Bolu Ajiboye and Bob Kirsch, biomedical engineers at Case Western Reserve
University, in Cleveland, used functional magnetic-resonance imaging to locate nerve
cells responsible for arm movements in the left motor cortex of Mr. Kochevar's brain.
The technique highlighted a patch of his brain to which the blood supply increased
whenever Mr. Kochevar imagined moving his right arm. The team then implanted
at that spot two 4x4-mm chips, known as Utah arrays, each armed with 96 tiny
electrodes, to measure the electrical activity of the 100 or so nerve cells there.
They also implanted 36 stimulating electrodes in the muscles of his right hand
and arm. With the Utah arrays in place, Mr. Kochevar was asked to imagine moving
a virtual arm in a computer simulation, and, later, to imagine moving his own arm
while it was being moved for him. The nerve cells firing in Mr. Kochevar's brain were
fed to a computer algorithm, which matched them to the motions of the virtual arm
and later, his own arm. After this training, the algorithm was able to detect brain
activity associated with Mr. Kochevar's intention to move his arm, and then trigger the
contraction of muscles needed to bring about the desired motion."
The Economist 1 April 2017

SEPTEMBER 2017

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

as a very solid 30-year prototype,
it's time to "call" the current instantiation of the Web as an experiment
from which we have learned much
and start on the next version.
Taking that further, maybe we
should see the current Web as a
good prototype of a design that now
needs to be tweaked, and perhaps
more substantially redesigned, to
pick up what we have learned first
time around about things like underlying architecture, the role and ownership of data, the risks of dominant
players, different approaches to rule
setting and rule maintenance, and
evolution and so on.
In the machine age, here are
some of the other obvious considerations that a "next Web" might
consider (based off of what the "first
Web" has already done in many of
these areas):
■ How we create and engage new
knowledge created in increasingly complex processes of
shared information, insight, and
implementation.
■ Becoming increasingly capable
in determining the requisite provisions of privacy and trust and
making them stick.
■ How we avoid unnecessary obstacles to the necessary pace
and creativity of new applications in technology capability
without losing the ability to ponder sufficiently their implications
and risks.
■ How the next Web effectively
turns each person in their own
"server," replete with a new level
of control and autonomy about
the data about them over which
they have much greater direction.
■ The need to maintain and improve open, standard navigation systems that make it easy
for people to find and use the
information and knowledge they
need, and contribute the insights
and expertise they grow.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017