Clive Thompson

Today there are nearly 900 rural co-ops still providing their communities with electricity. A DIY success story! Now history repeats itself—with broadband. Thirty-nine percent of rural Americans had no access to home broadband in 2016 (compared with 4 percent of folks in urban areas), because big telcos say it’s too expensive to build affordable fiber-optic broadband in the countryside. Residents have to make do with dialup or Wi-Fi from a library. So co-ops are solving the problem again.

Congress is finally turning its attention to Silicon Valley, but to tackle these issues, congressfolk will first have to understand them. Which means it’s time to reboot the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA was staffed with several hundred nonpartisan propellerheads who studied emerging science and tech. Every year they’d write numerous clear, detailed reports and they were on call to help any congressperson. It worked admirably. Its reports helped save money and lives. With a budget of only $20 million a year, the little agency had an outsize impact.