Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance

How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments

Adam Thierer

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781948647779
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Innovators of all stripes—such as Airbnb and Uber—are increasingly using new technological capabilities to circumvent traditional regulatory systems, or at least put pressure on public policymakers to reform laws and regulations that are outmoded, inefficient, or illogical. Disruptive innovators are emerging in other fields, too, using technologies as wide??ranging as 3D printers, drones, driverless cars, Bitcoin and blockchain, virtual reality, the "Internet of Things," and more. Some of these innovators just love to tinker. Others want to change the world with new life??enriching products. And many more are just looking to earn a living and support their families. Regardless of why they are doing it, these evasive entrepreneurs— innovators who don't always conform to social or legal norms—are changing the world and challenging their governments.

Beyond boosting economic growth and raising our living standards, evasive entrepreneurialism can play an important role in constraining unaccountable governmental activities that often fail to reflect common sense or the consent of the governed. In essence, evasive entrepreneurialism and technological civil disobedience are new checks and balances that help us rein in the excesses of the state, make government more transparent and accountable, and ensure that our civil rights and economic liberties are respected.

Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance explores why evasive entrepreneurs are increasingly engaged in different forms of technological civil disobedience and also makes the case that we should accept—and often even embrace—a certain amount of that activity as a way to foster innovation, economic growth, and accountable government.

1

WHY INNOVATION MATTERS

Before I discuss the growth of evasive entrepreneurialism and technological civil disobedience and provide more substantive examples, it is important to answer a more basic question: Why should we even care about innovation and the public policies governing entrepreneurial activities? This chapter considers some of the pushback against technological innovation and makes it clear how critics fail to account for the ways in which it has powered economic growth and human flourishing in a profoundly beneficial fashion throughout history.

For some people, asking why innovation matters will seem like a silly question, or one with a self-evident answer. Unfortunately, technological innovation is increasingly under attack from many politicians, academics, and social critics. In best-selling technology policy books that are assigned in university classrooms today, a common theme is evident: technology is something to be feared, and the benefits of innovation are dubious or fictitious. “Cautionary voices on the risks of rapid technological advancement are becoming louder,” observes technology historian Calestous Juma in his 2016 book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies.¹

That statement is hardly surprising, because a great many people prefer the status quo—whatever it may be for them or their organizations. When critics whip up panic about new technologies, they are playing into people’s worst fears and implicitly (sometimes quite explicitly) suggesting that the new and different are to be dreaded. But such status quo bias comes at an enormous cost—it means we will be giving up on the fruits of innovation because, as regulatory scholar Cristie Ford observes, “to a substantial degree we regulate in response to dread.”² If worst-case thinking and fear of the future come to dominate technology policy, we will not be able to discover new and better ways of fulfilling human needs and wants. That is why it is important to begin this book with a defense of innovation and entrepreneurial acts.

To be clear, technological innovation does involve tradeoffs and downsides, and regulation is sometimes needed to address serious risks associated with new technologies. Some innovators are nothing more than fraudsters, and some technologies by their very nature pose serious risk to life, limb, or property. Later chapters will discuss some of the more concerning risks associated with innovation and how better governance systems must be devised to address them.

On balance, however, technological innovation has done far more good than harm to humanity’s cause. Criticism of innovation needs to be grounded in reality and placed in context of what would have happened had we not innovated at all. Accordingly, this opening chapter discusses the swelling tide of anti-technology writing and advocacy and pushes back against the impulse to slow the wheels of progress. As we’ll see, that impulse would create more harm to humanity than it would solve, because technological innovation has been the fundamental driver of improvements in human well-being over time.

The Rising Techno-Pessimist Tide

Scholars have noted that “public concern over technology is not entirely new.”³ It can even be traced to stories found in the book of Genesis that offer both positive (Noah’s Ark) and negative (the Tower of Babel) perspectives on technology.⁴ But technological criticism has, not surprisingly, ramped up significantly in recent times as technology has become far more intertwined with every aspect of modern life.

Opposition to technological innovation has many motivations. Innovation critics often sneer at “the cult of convenience”⁵ and lament the supposed “paradox of choice,”⁶ or the idea that too many choices overwhelm us. Most people regard convenience and choices as great benefits, but from the critics’ perspective, the message is clear: more is less. Such skeptics prefer to slow things down and add friction to innovative processes in the name of protecting certain values or institutions that they fear technological change will erode.⁷ They constantly lament the supposed anxiety or alienation of the masses, although it often seems like they are mostly airing their own grievances as opposed to seriously documenting those of the actual public.⁸

Regardless, tech critics like Evgeny Morozov advocate a “radical critique of technology” and a “radical project of social transformation”⁹ that would evolve into a full-blown “degrowth movement.”¹⁰ As its very name implies, the degrowth movement questions whether growth is sustainable or even desirable. Degrowth proponents also take issue with the idea that growth is synonymous with progress or human well-being.¹¹ Critics of this ilk insist that “there’s nothing wrong with being a Luddite,”¹² because technology is dehumanizing and “will eliminate what it means to be human.”¹³ Critics also play into many people’s unease surrounding the growth of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics and argue that these technologies will lead us to a “jobless future” run by machines and automation.¹⁴

A generation ago, engineering historian Samuel C. Florman noted that the technology critics of the Industrial Age were fond of portraying people as “helpless slaves” who were becoming “programmed machines” at the expense of new technologies.¹⁵ Not much has changed since Florman made that assessment in 1976. If anything, today’s anti-innovation screeds double down on that rhetoric and often take an even darker turn, predicting a veritable “existential threat” to the future of civilization.¹⁶ Marc Goodman, author of Future Crimes, worries about our prospects for “surviving progress” and insists that “now is the time to completely reevaluate all that we take for granted in this modern technological world” before it is too late.¹⁷ Another gloom-and-doom book from The Atlantic correspondent Franklin Foer warns that modern technology companies are taking us down a “terrifying trajectory” by eroding “the integrity of institutions” and “altering human evolution” to the point that a concerted resistance is needed to save humanity from technology.¹⁸

The tone of most of these tracts is relentlessly pessimistic, with dystopian dread dripping off each page as the authors wonder aloud about “how to keep technology from slipping beyond our control.”¹⁹ Technology is not a helpful servant to humanity in books such as these; it is instead a “dangerous master” to be feared and resisted.²⁰ Magazine stories, journal articles, and blogs about technology often incorporate the same dark themes.²¹ References to Orwell and Huxley are common, and critics often insist that “surveillance capitalism”²² will “lead toward a world turned into a Skinner box.”²³ In other words, we are all just clueless lab rats being programmed to think and behave the way our corporate masters want, and the only benefit we get out of it, the critics say, is “cheap engineered bliss.”²⁴

Some of these modern tech critics may not even realize that they are articulating the same fears (and making some of the same gloomy Chicken Little predictions) that earlier generations of critics made many times before. In a best-selling 1970 book, futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term “future shock” to describe what he called “the disease of change” and the “real sickness from which increasingly large numbers already suffer.”²⁵ Toffler argued this disease was brought on by the “shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change too fast.”²⁶ Had this disease really infected humanity to the extent that some tech critics imagined in the 1970s, one would think civilization would have already suffered catastrophic collapse. Humanity proved more resilient than those critics feared. Yet, roughly a half century later, books are still regularly published with similarly scary titles or phrases like “data smog,”²⁷ “information anxiety,”²⁸ “the tyranny of email,”²⁹ “dying for information,”³⁰ “the dumbest generation,”³¹ “the end of reading,”³² “digital barbarism,”³³ “digital vertigo,”³⁴ and “world without mind.”³⁵

Fear Entrepreneurs and False Equivalence in Tech Policy Debates

Many of the critics who use such apocalyptic rhetoric are acting as fear entrepreneurs. Fear entrepreneurs specialize in framing new technological developments as catastrophes to whip up panic and garner attention for themselves and their cause, whatever it may be.³⁶ One of the ways they do so is by using loaded language³⁷ and threat inflation, which has been defined as “the attempt by elites to create concern for a threat that goes beyond the scope and urgency that a disinterested analysis would justify.”³⁸ At worst, critics engage in false equivalence, or the fallacy of inconsistency, by drawing comparisons between two situations or arguments that actually have very little in common. A few examples follow:

• Genetically modified organisms: Policy debates over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are rife with threat inflation and loaded language such as “fra...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• 1. WHY INNOVATION MATTERS
• 2. EVASIVE ENTREPRENEURIALISM: THEORY AND EXAMPLES
• 3. DISOBEDIENCE: THEN AND NOW
• 4. WHY EVASIVE ENTREPRENEURIALISM IS ON THE RISE
• 5. INNOVATION AS CHECKS AND BALANCES
• 6. HUMANISM, ETHICS, AND RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION
• 7. SOFT LAW AND THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGICAL GOVERNANCE
• 8. DEFENDING INNOVATION: A BLUEPRINT
• 9. CONCLUSION: THE CASE FOR RATIONAL OPTIMISM
• POSTSCRIPT: EVASIVENESS DURING A PANDEMIC
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR