There are two things that I love a whole lot. One is speculative fiction. The other is a really good wargaming exercise. In fact, I’d hold that both are essential to any career in policy that isn’t just mealy-mouthed corporate lobbying.
Which is why this cruel but brilliant speculative policy exercise, put forth in this week’s newsletter from Tech Policy Press, made my heart sing and scream in anguish at the same time:
A chance to hear your voice on the Tech Policy Press podcast
This week, I’ll be at Georgetown for an exciting conference hosted by The Privacy Center at Georgetown Law called “Life After Data: the conference on de-datafication.” The event and the sessions at it are offered as a provocation to “imagine a future in which digital data is no longer the currency mediating all of our social, economic and political systems, structures and practices. How might we get there from here?”
I answered one of the calls, and will give a short, speculative talk on the topic “Why, How, and When to Abandon the Internet.” With corporate and government surveillance, AI agents and machine-generated slop increasingly overrunning the web, I reckon it’s worth engaging in some thought experiments about what might come next.
To help me think it through, I’m inviting Tech Policy Press’ global audience to send voice memos explaining in their own voices how they would answer the provocation, and I plan to use a selection of these submissions in the podcast.
If you are interested in participating, consider responding to one of these questions:
What would have to break, or be built, before people would be willing to leave today’s internet behind?
Who would lead such an effort, and who might stand in its way?
What from today’s internet and the platforms that define it is worth saving, and what should be left behind?
What would a better, healthier, more sustainable and pro-democratic network look like, and how would we build it?
We’re looking for short memos, one to two minutes long.
See what they did there?
They didn’t ask you to write a philosophical treatise about technology, human rights, ethics, human flourishing, or anything which exists somewhere between heaven and earth, Horatio.
Nor did they ask you for an academic paper, or a research initiative, stuffed with statistics and empirical data via ethical approval by a committee followed by a year of rigid peer review by another committee.
They asked you to do it how it works on the day this-is-not-exercise-this-is-real-world goes down: gather the facts, make your recommendation, and give it to the deciding policymaker in a two-minute voice memo. Because that is all you get.
That is. Fucking. Brilliant.
On a screen, that provocation and its constraints sounds sadistically cruel.
Yes it is: that is the point. You don’t get to pick either on the day.
What you do get to pick is your imagination, or your failure to have it.
Take the provocation above, and think about it, but don’t tell me your answers. Don’t tell anyone, in fact, except maybe TPP.
Look at the questions as you should look at any speculative wargaming exercise: a reminder that on the day it all goes down very fast, for all you’ve seen and done in your career, your failure of imagination is the one thing you will be remembered for.
