Thread by @zittrain

Last year, just before the pandemic hit, I gave the @clarehall_cam Tanner Lectures on Human Values, reflecting on how tech has empowered humanity -- and yet it rightly feels like we have less and less control. today.law.harvard.edu/gaining-power-…

That added power, for example, doesn't just make autonomous vehicles work without drivers. It means those cars can answer to, say, law enforcement authorities instead of the passengers -- locking the doors and driving them to the nearest police station if a warrant is issued.

Our 25 years of a mainstreamed Internet has seen three eras of (non)governance. The first is "rights" -- focusing on how to enjoy the new freedoms of communication without interference from governments who would surveill it and big interests (e.g., ©) who are harmed by it.

The Rights Era, focused on defense against interference, is then eclipsed by the Public Health Era. Here the worry is about broad, systemic harms from unmediated communication - abuse, harassment, disinformation - and the indifference by platforms who could do something about it.

There's no easy way to reconcile rights and public health frameworks. Both state real problems. Solutions often can't be reconciled. But having a few social media founders with permanent unilateral decisionmaking over them is a universally bad (non)answer. theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

What's emerging is an approach to give these decisions the weight and attention they deserve, perhaps from external decisionmakers who don't have the corporate executives' day-to-day incentives and pressures. Like the FB @oversightboard, today releasing its first decisions.

This new era of more formal external process, to try to achieve legitimacy, is at just the time that digital intermediaries, in part thanks to AI, really can and do monitor and intervene in the flow of information, for better or worse. Abdication is now a choice, not a necessity.

Anyway, here's the link to the full lecture. Its references to "public health" were both figurative and literal -- though before the pandemic. All the more in play now.

Curious what you think.

For those who are allergic to slides or otherwise like podcasts, here's the podcastified version of the Tanner lecture, with thanks to @lydia_rosenberg podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tan…