“Which is late, isn’t it, for reading club ticker-tapes.”
“Not my world, old boy.”
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John Le Carre
I’m delighted to announce that the Foundation for Information Policy Research are starting up a new blog, called The Ticker-Tape. The intention is for this to serve as a place for ideas, analysis, arguments, and the latest research on technology, policy, and society by the Foundation for Information Policy Research, our friends and colleagues.
This is a particularly febrile time for the work we do as engineers, academics, policymakers, activists, and journalists with an interest in technology and society.
A small number of particularly loud industry voices, who may be experts on their own ‘frontier’ technologies but often know little about the social problems or domains into which their technologies are being dropped, have an outsize influence on our politics and on the policymaking process.
In the other direction, as an understandable reaction to large-scale emerging harms associated with innovation, policymakers often seek to shape the world in their own ways without necessarily understanding what is possible in terms of technology design. Simply ordering technology companies to backdoor encrypted services while retaining security protections for everyday users, for example, does not make this a reality.
We at FIPR are seeking to promote better links between these different kinds of knowledge – about technology, social issues, law, and policy. We see a political system caught between a desperate need for economic growth through the deus ex machina of technological innovation on the one hand, and revulsion at the harms that appear to spill out of these new technologies on the other.
There is a need for independent, expert analysis that neither sees technology as the sole cause of social problems, nor as a blank canvas entirely shaped by human users. Rather, we hope to move past the utopian and dystopian narratives that dominate public discourse to explore how we might navigate the complex technical, social, and political dimensions of the problems that we face today.
Dr Ben Collier
Chair, Foundation for Information Policy Research