Zittrain channeling Hayek

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We have a tech policy reading group at Mercatus, and we’ve been reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. I am still working through it, but one thing that caught my eye was the striking similarity between the way Zittrain frames his argument for why the Internet is both an amazingly beneficial technology and in such serious danger of being supplanted by less beneficial technologies, and the way F.A. Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, described the benefits of economic liberalism and the possibility of its replacement with socialism.

Zittrain’s three principles are (page 64):

• “Our information technology ecosystem functions best with generative technology at its core.”
• “Generativity instigates a pattern both within and beyond the technological layers of the information technology ecosystem.”
• “Proponents of generative systems ignore the drawbacks attendant to generativity’s success at their peril.”

Hayek, in analyzing why classical liberal thinking fell out of favor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pointed out that the economic and financial “ecosystem” functioned best with spontaneous order at its core. However, once rulers allowed spontaneous order to enter into the economic “ecosystem,” it was only a matter of time before their subjects began demanding the same privileges in the political and social ecosystems. Rights such as voting, freedom of speech and press, and the right of association, can be viewed as spontaneous order “instigating a pattern both with and beyond” the economic ecosystem. Finally, the very fact of liberalism’s success at raising the living standards of ordinary working people led those people to demand more and faster change for the better, even if the methods they planned to use (socialism and planning) threatened the very prosperity and freedom liberalism had produced. According to Hayek,

What had been an inspiring promise seemed no longer enough, the rate of progress far too slow; and the principles which had made this progress possible in the past came to be regarded more as obstacles to speedier progress…than as the conditions for the preservation and development of what had already been achieved. (page 71)

This final point parallel’s Zittrain’s own warnings about generativity’s success leading to its eventual replacement with a non-generative, “sterile,” information ecosystem.

While Hayek’s main contention was that the western democracies needed to turn back from socialism and centralized planning and return to a more-or-less spontaneous order in the economic sphere, I get the feeling from what I have so far in Zittrain’s book that he wants to place more emphasis on government intervention and regulation to preserve generativity. As I am not finished with the book yet, I will reserve judgement about his conclusions, though I am curious about how Zittrain’s proposed solutions differ from Hayek’s recommendations.

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