Eyeing the costs of the tech boom

Technology revolutions are messy: bright ideas fizzle, companies fail, investors lose money. Even useful inventions contain the seeds of unintended effects.

Steam power led to child-labor exploitation. Henry Ford's cars for the masses unwittingly speeded up global warming. So what's the downside lurking in today's spread of information technology and interconnectedness?

The first symptoms are already popping up: spam, loss of privacy, and cybercrime. Beyond these lie what one observer calls "a culture of distraction" and, according to others, the leading sliver of a social wedge between sets of workers.

Those most threatened: consumers and workers with neither the skills to cope with information overload nor the ability to fend off high-tech professional competition from abroad. Call them New Economy Luddites.

"If you think of the 19th century as the globalization of manufacturing, the 21st century could be the globalization of paper pushing," says Brad DeLong, economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "And that's really bad news for the paper pushers.... The white-collar jobs done in Nebraska can be done in Bombay."

"There's a kind of tide of automation that's washing in," says W. Brian Arthur, economist at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, N.M. "The Industrial Revolution was wrenching because it took people who were self-employed and made them employees in the mid-1800s. It shifted power to the factory and factory owners.... But in this new revolution, the reactions may not be from the workers. The struggle could be over security and anomie - disgruntlement of people shut out of the system."

Perhaps the biggest irony of the New Economy is the way in which technology and information balance each other out. The faster the technology moves, the heavier the information burden becomes. Ask anyone who routinely cleans spam from his or her electronic mailbox.

Spam - or Internet junk mail - clogs communication channels and slows down workers. According to one estimate, it cost businesses some $500 per employee last year.

And consumers pay $2 to $3 a year extra for Internet service because of the expanding load, experts estimated.

Spam isn't merely unwanted; it's often pornographic or illegal.

"The technology ... has opened up yet another avenue for Americans to fleece each other," says Dan Birchall, executive director of SpamCon Foundation, an antispam group based in San Francisco.

Fortunately, society lies on the verge of controlling the phenomenon. For example, computer users are using filtering software that automatically identifies and throws out junk e-mail. More important, authorities are beginning to crack down on perpetrators. Just over half the states in America have enacted some kind of spam regulation.

Simply sending out an unsolicited message nationwide almost certainly will break the law in two or three states, Mr. Birchall says. "As the big-time players continue to operate the way they're operating, they're in increasing danger of legal action."

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