Warren Ellis statements for 2004 contain a comment by Cory Doctorow talking about the role, technology and policy will play in the next 20 years:
The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It's about realizing that all the really hard problems -- free expression, copyright, due process, social networking -- may have technical dimensions, but they aren't technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can't solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.
In response to this Kevin Werbach states that this is a wrong formulation:
A nice formulation, but, with all due respect, a wrong one. Technology and policy are always intertwined. Both of them always matter.
Similar to Jason Kottke I believe that Cory did not intend to say that technology will not matter anymore in the next two decades. It's just that culture, policy and the other things, which organize humanity nowadays, have not properly caught up on big parts of the bunch of cool and awesome technology-related stuff (p2p technologies, weblogs, digitally available information in general, etc.) that has emerged in the past years. Nevertheless I don't expect the technology to delay its evolution, until policy has reached the same level. (Which would be totally irrealistic, by the way.) Instead the technology will always be ahead of the intertwined policy in most concerns, which is only logical. At the same time policy will be able to catch up on new technology faster than now.