The point about a humanities background and internet regulation reminds me of some great dialogue from a Stephenson novel:
"Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't being told that they were wrong that offended them, though it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything...
"Very well, let me put it this way," Kivistik said "How many on ramps will connect the world's ghettos to the Information Superhighway?"
The words came out of Randy's mouth before he had time to think better of it. "The Information Superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a break!" he said.
"That doesn't tell me very much," Kivistik said."Everything is a metaphor. The word 'fork' is a metaphor for this object." He held up a fork. "All discourse is built from metaphors."
"That's no excuse for using bad metaphors," Randy said. "Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?" Kivistik said, doing his killer impression of a heavy lidded, mouth breathing undergraduate. Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all a start with:
"Who decides what's bad? I do."
Even Dr.G.E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn't sure if Randy was joking. "Excuse me?" Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. "It's like this," he said. "I've read your book. I've seen you on TV. I've heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I
know that you're not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.''
"Oh," Kivistik said in mock confusion, "I didn't realize one had to have qualifications."
"I think it's clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I'm sick, I don't ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it."
"Funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet," Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd.
"You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true," Randy said, pleasantly enough. "A number of Internet experts have written well reasoned books that are sharply critical of it." Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone. "So," Randy continued, "to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D." "Oh. I see," Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. "So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology." The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck.
"I'm not sure what a technocrat is," Randy said. "Am I a technocrat? I'm just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays,
and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?"