It's also easy to step back until something good comes of it, focus on just the good, and ignore the bad. Take your cell phone example. Cell phones are allowin

It's also easy to step back until something good comes of it, focus on just the good, and ignore the bad. Take your cell phone example. Cell phones are allowing the government to track the location of all it's citizens. Without a warrant in some cases. If somebody would have predicted that back when cellphones were introduced, people would have laughed them out of town. It was a ludicrous and paranoid idea. Yet here we are. We sit around watching videos, liking Facebook comments, and checking in at various events, all while a critical part of our anonymity has been destroyed. I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm saying there is a mix. If you ask me, I'd rather not have cell phones and have a more private life. No amount of slick packaging and voice control interfaces is going to make up for what I've lost. But we don't have to choose, of course. We can have our cake and eat it too. What's happened is that technology is staying leaps and bounds ahead of politics. It's like we're having to re-engineer the social contract every couple of decades or so. And the yahoos we have in power around the world are much more interested in their petty political games than this seismic shift that's occurring under them (which, in all honesty, they probably don't understand and probably couldn't deal with anyway). So the system gets more and more out of whack. Just wanted to balance what you were saying. This isn't a story of technology always making things better even though we sometimes doubt. It's a story of technology making things more complicated and making the individual more powerful in some ways and that having effects that we poorly understand.