See: Black Mirror. All technology is bad in the wrong hands. Technology is always just a tool. Smartphones and webcams don't spy on people. People spy on people. People kill each other. People steal from the poor. Et cetera. The shape of the tool can be made to be malicious. For instance, a gun is only good as a ballistics toy that you have to be very creative to use constructively, or it can be used to kill. Nuclear bombs could be used for the most efficient nuclear power generation available (haw haw but it was seriously considered [0]).
So, some questions we must always ask about a technology are:
1. How malicious is its shape?
2. Is it too powerful for use?
3. Does society have enough control over itself to actually prevent it from being made?
This is one of the lines of thinking you see around AI, as the emergence of a powerful AI is seen as a fast approaching inevitability.
I sort of take the contrary view. I think 24 hour news coverage is inherently bad and cannot ever be good, because it doesn't give anchors enough time to react and analyse events, or viewers to digest and critically examine what they have watched. There are many examples like this, where the form itself is actually the problem even without any specifically malicious use.
You would say the shape of fast response news is malicious. I disagree. I think speed for accuracy is a tradeoff. There is a benefit to having fast response news. I don't have the patience to learn all of the psychological models necessary to substantiate this claim, but I do know people are more more motivated to take action by events that happen closer in time. Some details in breaking news will be wrong, but you wouldn't want to wait a week to learn about a school shooting or the stopping of all international travel.
Fast response news and 24 hours news are different things. "Fast response" also covers things like Twitter, which, while rife with its own problems, is at least theoretically capable of giving you an immediate, succinct news bulletin and then shutting up.
24 hour news stations can't do this. They have to blather and overanalyze rumors and twist words and sometimes lie because they need people to watch all the time, even when nothing is happening. Plus, since they are so mass-market focused (they have to be because of the revenue demands of the medium), any in-depth analysis is off-limits. Thus, viewers come away with surface-level, emotionally-charged and largely inaccurate ideas--flaws which are inherent to the system.
> Smartphones and webcams don't spy on people. People spy on people.
Well yes, but those smartphones were designed by people, and many of them are designed to spy on people. While it’s true that there’s (almost) nothing about smartphones that makes them inherently intrusive, that’s cold comfort when surveillance is the industry standard.
(But yeah, I’m keeping a close eye on Linux smartphone development for that reason.)
So, some questions we must always ask about a technology are:
1. How malicious is its shape?
2. Is it too powerful for use?
3. Does society have enough control over itself to actually prevent it from being made?
This is one of the lines of thinking you see around AI, as the emergence of a powerful AI is seen as a fast approaching inevitability.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gnome