J.D. Tuccille on Individuals' Growing Technological Edge Over Governments

Public Domain

Society has taken a weird fork in the road, says J.D. Tuccille, managing editor of Reason 24/7. It's weird, he says, because we've taken both paths. On one hand, policy in many areas has become more controlling and more intrusive. On the other hand, technology increasingly empowers individuals to evade surveillance and restrictions, hide and transfer funds, and acquire or even manufacture forbidden goods, including firearms, without regard to laws dictated from above. This growing divergence between what people can do and what their rulers want them to do may be a portent of an accelerating technology-fueled cold civil war.