Caleb Carr’s pro-censorship argument in Salon.Com is so poorly constructed it is almost not worth replying to, except to point out that most pro-censorship arguments rely on much the same premise which its advocates always assume but rarely even attempt to prove. According to Carr,
It is my belief, for which I offer no apology, that most of that technology [the Internet] is making people dumber: It is teaching them how to assemble massive amounts of information, of arcane minuitia, without simultaneously teaching them how to assemble those bits of information into integrated bodies of knowledge — such integration being the only function that distinguishes the human brain from a mechanical computer.
He might not want to offer an apology for this view, but it might be nice if he’d bother to offer even a shred of evidence for such an extreme claim. Carr’s call for enlightened government masters to filter out all of the bad information seems nothing more than a rehashing of Plato’s elitist argument in The Republic.
At the beginning of his essay, Carr says he doesn’t understand what the word “dystopian” means as applied to his latest novel, “Killing Time.” According to my handy dictionary, dystopia means “an imaginary place which is depressingly wretched and whose people lead a fearful existence.” Or the sort of future that humanity is in store for if it ever starts listening to people like Carr.