“in the long run” is kind of the key phrase, you’re using it to stuff a lot of moral complexity into the closet. The printing press may have been good for socie

“in the long run” is kind of the key phrase, you’re using it to stuff a lot of moral complexity into the closet. The printing press may have been good for society in the long run, but in the short run it caused a century of sectarian warfare that killed tens of millions of people. If the Internet is analogous (and I’m not saying it definitely is, but I don’t think it can be clearly ruled out either), you don’t think people living now should have a say in whether they just get to be collateral damage on the road to a Utopian future? That was exactly the sort of thinking behind some of the ghastly failures of 20th-century authoritarianism.