Cultural Agoraphobia

Thanks to legal scholar James Boyle and a great article by The Observer’s John Naughton, we now have a new term for control freaks … ‘cultural agoraphobics’. Naughton quotes Boyle’s views that “cultural agoraphobia … leads us always to emphasise the downsides of openness and lack of central control and to overvalue the virtues of order and authority.”  Naughton then starts using some crowd surfing language … “Industries and governments are wasting incalculable amounts of money and energy in Canute-like resistance to the oncoming wave when what they should be doing is figuring out ways to ride it.”