Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

When I started my first job in the 1970s, one of the preoccupations of the journalism world was technology — how the rapid advance of computers was going to affect production and the thousands of jobs dependent on the old technology of “hot type,” metallic pieces assembled in boxes and put on the press for each weekly and daily edition.

Many of those jobs went away, and fear of “replacement” began mounting. It was easier for writers. I graduated from my manual typewriter, which allowed the satisfying whacking of keys on deadline, to an elegant IBM Selectric when I became editor. The first clunky Apple terminals came next, then the full “word processors” we still use today.

All these changes made our jobs a bit easier without changing them much. We still gathered news on the phone and in person, and life was good.

I’ve thought a lot about when technology went wrong — when the heedless use of “the latest” began making our public lives worse, not better — miserable, in fact. Even before the pandemic, people were not talking, not communicating, not even making the effort to meet face-to-face to enjoy camaraderie or resolve differences.

One major cause was the failure our federal government to act appropriately concerning the internet and its many challenges. Rather than responding as this revolutionary technology unfolded, it abandoned its proper role.

The vehicle was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by a big business-friendly Democrat, Bill Clinton. The law obliterated the established distinction between public communication — regulated by federal and state authorities — and private communication, fully protected by the First Amendment and out of bounds to government interference.

Within a few years the damage was obvious, but widely ignored amid gush over the wonderful things tech barons would do for us. Until then, the U.S. Postal Service carried most private communications privately, and even fast-growing email services — this was before “social media” — could have been granted similar protections, but were not.

Then Gmail was launched in 2004. As tech historian Nicholas Carr puts it, “When Google introduced its Gmail service, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail.”

And there was apparently nothing we could do about it. The Telecommunications Act was passed under the false premise that the internet was a fragile entity needing protection. It blocked any federal authority from taxing or regulating it, and preempted states and local government from doing so. Ordinarily the “laboratories of democracy,” states found their hands tied.

It wasn’t always this way. Everyone remembers the 1912 sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic, but few realize why vessels that could have saved many more passengers couldn’t find the doomed ship. Unregulated “pirate” radio transmissions so scrambled ship-to-ship communications that vital messages couldn’t get through or be understood.

Congress responded the same year, passing the Radio Act requiring radio operators to have licenses, banning “malicious” messages and confining amateurs to shortwave frequencies. Eventually, the Federal Communications Commission took over and applied a similar approach to television, then cable. Now, the FCC is as helpless before the internet as the rest of us.

The key error was deciding private business could perform all the tasks that were needed. The very people who make billions of dollars by appropriating — less politely, stealing — our personal data keep telling us we must turn over more and more of our lives to them.

AI is only the latest of the false gods I first encountered all those years ago. In a blizzard of propagandistic news releases and opinion pieces as well as relentless advertising, we’re briefed on AI’s wonders. Now everyone can be an artist or writer!

Some especially overheated rhetoric contends that AI can replace half our jobs, or all of them. To which one answers: Who will dig the ditches, fix the plumbing and take care of our children?

The reality, as we should know by now, is that technology creates as many jobs as it destroys; they’re just different jobs. In America, we unite around the belief that most people can and should work for a living, and we broadly accept the private enterprise system underlying our prosperity.

But we must wrest control back from the billionaires, starting by repealing the Telecommunications Act and replacing it with something sensible. A tall order indeed, but we have to start somewhere. Why not back at the beginning?