Gosh, pardon me while I chime in on this virulent (in a good way) meme . . .
The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems — free expression, copyright, due process, social networking — may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.
This needs to be repeated until it’s understood. Refusing to see media piracy as a failure to see a business opportunity, this whole debacle about e-voting — people go on about these as technology problems but they’re policy/legal challenges.
The Center I was working at for most of 2003 could be addressing these issues.