These are just some of the technology-debunking headlines that have run in the past few months in the New York Times. But despite the paper's reputation for occasionally lapsing into technoid heebie-jeebies, this batch of alarmist exclamations can't be pinned on the Times itself. The headlines belong to paid advocacy advertisements -- labeled as such -- placed by a loose coalition of about 80 nonprofits calling itself the Turning Point Project.

The goal of the Turning Point Project, say its organizers, is to open a debate about the culture's "technomania." From e-commerce to computers in the schools to virtual community -- these dystopic doomsayers find something to lament about virtually every aspect of contemporary technoculture. The picture they paint of the future is even grimmer: self-generating robots leading us to a "post-biological" future, a society in which a genetically enhanced "GenRich" elite rules. Are you ready for "designer babies"? How about a pet that's a "chimera" -- half-human and half-animal? (Actually, that one sounds kind of cool.)

"In the marketplace of ideas, our contribution is to get these ideas out there, debated and thought over, as opposed to the ideas that are simply disguised propaganda for certain economic interests," says Herb Chao Gunther, president of the Public Media Center, a nonprofit ad agency that helped the groups put together the ads.

It would be all too easy to casually dismiss the sometimes screechy screeds as just so much lefty Luddite-ism run amok. The very broaching of such questions as who controls new technologies, and to what end, is bound to raise the hackles of some technologists, particularly those predisposed to bridle against any government or Joe Public interference with their work.

As libertarian activist and open-source software evangelist Eric Raymond says in response to the ad campaign, "This is pretty much the standard anti-technology, anti-markets, anti-individual-freedom ranting by the usual suspects -- the spoiled rich children of all ages, confident that they and only they know the right way to live and that all change not under their political control is bad. They're no good at inventing things and no good at creating wealth -- but, boy, are they full of convictions about how the rest of us ought to live and what technologies ought to be 'allowed.'"

Despite Raymond-like ire, there's still no getting around the reality that the ad campaign is raising questions that are rarely heard in current news coverage of technology. And as politicians continue to slobber over Silicon Valley dollars, don't look to them to take a strong stand on the potential negative consequences of technological progress. Consider, for a moment, both Al Gore's and George W. Bush's blue-sky pronouncements about technology. The prospect of either candidate becoming president doesn't inspire any confidence at all that the next administration might warm to the role of technology watchdog.

In the absence of any government supervision, then, the Turning Point Project wants to sound the alarm.

The Free Software Project
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