Growth, jobs and more

For me personally, the most enjoyable moment in that whole “fake news” commotion has been the re-discovery of the concept called truth by the progressives. Finally the pudding of post-modernism relativism was made available for eating. And it did not taste well. However, fake news and related phenomena, such as echo chambers and social bots, are a matter of concern for the entire political spectrum. Politicians and media feel challenged or even threatened by it. Some are even suggesting that in order to save democracy we need to regulate social media just like the printed press. The issue boils down to the balance between the right of free speech and the danger of false information. There is a growing tendency to make the danger look bigger and the issue of freedom of speech smaller in order to achieve balance and thereby justify more governmental control of the social media at the expense of freedom of speech. The advocates of tighter regulation of social media base their argume...

One of the promises of the internet has been that it will bring about better democracy ( here and here , for example). Even before the web was invented, Vannevar Bush, the creator of the hypertext concept and the Memex machine expected science and information will lead to a better society ( source ). Since 1990s, when those ideas started to materialize, everybody saw that the internet is vastly increasing the access to information and the ease of connecting people. The conventional wisdom has been that better informed citizens would be making better political decisions and that the more connected people will also be forging a more tightly connected society. This would both lead to e- (for electronic) or i- (for internet) democracy. Peak eDemocracy In retrospect, it would appear that the peak eDemocracy optimism was reached in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama as the president of the United States. His was one of the first campaigns where the internet played a major, some wo...

The Google probe seems to prove that the EU is way too focused on fighting old wars. However, if it wants to put in place a system where innovation thrives it must care less for the existing IT industry and do more for those that do not exist yet. Already during the early 1990s – in the  Bangemann Report  – the information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been politically understood as a strategic development priority of the European Union. ICTs were high on the agenda of the Lisbon Strategy whose goal was “to make Europe the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world”. In the Europe 2020 Strategy, the Digital Agenda for Europe is one of the seven flagship projects. Its overall aim is “to deliver sustainable economic and social benefits from a digital single market based on fast and ultra fast internet and interoperable applications.”     Schumpeter: Profit is result of innovation European policies in the field of innovation are based...