Opinion | China’s tech crackdown is nothing to be alarmed about, but blind faith in unrestrained technology is

Technology, unmoored from moral and political control, is the unsteady foundation of the modern world. It has revolutionised how we work, live, travel and interact in both positive and negative ways, but we are slowly realising that not all artefacts and processes of modern science are beneficial, nor are all impingements on them harmful.

Marshall McLuhan famously argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy that the printing press, by broadening literacy, created the modern nation state, but also fostered social fragmentation, individual alienation and nationalism. Some view any political role in technology, any restriction on its individual or corporate use, as anathema. However, this blinkered view is as naive and problematic as the opposite extreme.