—“Technology explodes the prevalence of externalities–not just the frequency, but also the variety. The faster the pace of technological evolution, the more urgent the need to develop better and better systems of accounting for externalities, and mechanisms for adequately imposing costs on those who generate them.”— Skinner Layne
I would state it as wealth from technology makes it cheap to explore our differences and export externalities, for the simple reason that there is a delay between our development of any technology, the discovery of externalities, and the production of prohibitions on the actions that produce those (negative) externalities. And that the reason is government usurpation of our rights to use the courts to defend the commons as well as private and semi-private property. The wealthier we get the easier it is to use the courts and private interests to police innovations and externalities produced by them. The problem isn’t tech, or fear of tech, but that we have no systematic means of acting to constrain externalities in the commons because government has taken from us that role.