Technology & Democracy

Metsada israel

Israel: Leader of the Free World

For eight decades after the end of World War Two, America's proudest title was "Leader of the Free World." Today, that title properly belongs to Israel both on grounds of practical leadership and grasp of what it means to be a free people. Read More ›
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An Interview with George Gilder Asks, Can You Pass the Israel Test?

In The Israel Test, newly revised and republished by Encounter Books, George Gilder answers the antisemites, and explains the meaning of Israel as the most economically dynamic, democratic and pro-Western state in the Middle East—and a crucial US economic and defense ally. Bruce Chapman and George Gilder discuss. Read More ›
Smartphone_Use

The Administrative State Can Put a Bug in Your Phone

In the age of cellphones and the internet, consumers often face a simple choice: convenience or privacy? Do we let Big Tech have access to our private communications and free email accounts because it's so easy? Once you've said yes — and who among us has not? — it's not a stretch to think that Big Data already has almost all your information, so why get picky at the next juncture? Read More ›

From Darwinism to Dataism: Will We Lose Our Representative Democracy to Techno-Religion?

Science fiction writers have long understood that when tyranny comes it often is introduced as some improvement, or as the correction of some perceived problem. C. S. Lewis, for example, warned of the therapeutic state that wants what is best for us, whether we ask for it or not. It starts as science, becomes scientism, then demands obedience. Jeremy Rifkin is a philosopher of Big Data in our own time who has a Marxist view of human good, organized in the “Commons,” whose space, according to his book “The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism,” is “more basic than both business and the market.” He writes that “The very purpose Read More ›

Israeli Tech Can Slake World’s Water Thirst

Nursery flowers watered with drip irrigation in Israel

Nursery flowers watered with drip irrigation in Israel

California wastes water and blames the drought for the resulting shortages. Arizona is better off. Israel is the world leader, however, in water-related technology. Most of the Middle East exports terrorists; Israel exports technology to create a more verdant and abundant future.

Here is a series of connected articles that explain Israel’s innovations in drip-irrigation (much discussed also in George Gilder’s The Israel Test), drought resistant crop development, desalinization, squeezing water out of dew and creating winter-fed cisterns like the Nabateans used 2000 years ago in the “rose red” city of Petra. Read More ›

Tech “Elders” Oppose Obama Internet Grab

Discovery Sr. Fellow George Gilder and other “elders” of the privatized Internet era expressed their alarm over drive by the FCC and Obama Administration to put Internet innovation under federal regulation in the name of “Net Neutrality”. They want an “open Internet” instead.

The Daily Caller said, “Tech elder George Gilder, a futurist author and co-founder of the Discovery Institute, told TheDCNF that businesses have no incentive to interfere with Internet freedom. ‘Their interests are aligned with an open Internet,’ he noted, ‘and the idea that Title II can impose an open internet is just quixotic.'”

A sizable media contingent covered the “elders” presser, and noted the significance of leaders such as Bob Metcalf, John Perry Barlow, Mark Cuban and Scott McNeilly, among others, speaking out on a controversial subject. Daniel Berniger organized the event.

George Gilder advised me today that the Internet companies now represent almost half the value of the NASDAQ and that putting the FCC into the role of regulating them–using the old telephone company model of 1934–could greatly damage economic growth. “It’s Obama’s biggest socialist grab so far,” Gilder said. Read More ›