Lockdowns were a huge policy mistake. I blame Silicon Valley. I know, I know, the real blame resides with ill-informed technocrats who instituted the draconian and non-Jeffersonian lockdowns: the Trump and Biden administrations, blue-state governors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the rest of the alphabet soup of head-nodding agencies. Yet policy makers implemented lockdowns only because they could—because Silicon Valley provided the tools to lock people in their homes without completely imploding the economy.
Think about it. You couldn’t force lockdowns without laptops, Zoom, Amazon deliveries, cloud computing, Slack, QR codes or Netflix. Without them, lockdowns would have lasted two, maybe three weeks tops before the utter destruction of the economy forced everyone back to the workplace. Instead, we took the Faucian bargain of technology-enabled yearlong lockdowns because it was doable. Silicon Valley’s tools became shackles.
Lockdowns came with huge costs: job losses, increased crime, stunted learning, delayed medical treatments, violent protests, government spending blowouts, supply-chain disruptions, inflation, mental-health issues—all avoidable. Like bad air days, I fear bad carbon days will soon invoke climate-emergency lockdowns to keep people from driving.
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. The latest example is the plan to install cameras on every New York City subway car to limit crime. Gov. Kathy Hochul said, “You think Big Brother is watching you on the subways? You’re absolutely right. That is our intent.” Privacy advocates, such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, are naturally up in arms. Its statement reads, “Living in a sweeping surveillance state shouldn’t be the price we pay to be safe.”
Smart cities are now possible. Surveillance cameras, congestion pricing, timed traffic lights, buses that actually show up on time, balanced electricity usage, it could be urban utopia. But I wonder when smart cities crash, will we turn them off and then back on again? China has already created smart cities and uses data as scoring inputs for its Social Credit System, which stifles freedom for its citizens. Tech giveth and taketh.
The National Traffic Safety Board last week recommended blood-alcohol monitoring for all new vehicles. Another invasion of privacy, although no word yet from the New York Civil Liberties Union.