Political compass for the21st century

[pbrower2a]

Technology changes things. Automobiles changed the way in which people dated. People used to rely upon the narrow opportunities in small towns and in limited neighborhoods, but once people could drive twenty miles that expanded opportunity greatly. Could i (in theory) date someone a hundred miles away? Sure, and I would think little of the difficulty. Maybe I would find it easier to find someone more similar to me. Radio made the opera and symphony available (when NBC actually had concerts on the air, as is still the norm for some state-run radio broadcasters such as the BBC. Cinema put some excellent drama and comedy in reach of millions who would have never had them (although that would have been more true in the 1930's than now). It was a good way of disseminating culture and politics. Propaganda? Of course. There's always a dark side and that says more about people than about amoral technology.

As with economic assets or bureaucratic power, what people do with a technology says more of them than does the technology. There were plenty of honorable or at least benign things to do with automobiles. John Dillinger found some horrible uses for automobiles. Radio could as easily disseminate Josef Goebbels as Billy Graham. The same technology that allows a record company to press audio recordings of Mozart piano concertos can also press audio recordings of "Cop Killer". And, yes, beware the Dark Web.