A society that's too disordered to control e-mail spam and computer viruses is not smart enough to handle any more technology. More technology may have been reasonable 75 years ago when it promised to free us from the burden of work, yet now it has become feasible for millions of indviduals to choose not to work. (They work anyways.)
In his essay In Praise of Idleness (freely available on the internet), Bertrand Russell realized three quarters of a century ago that not technological progress, but social reform is needed to improve society.
Carl Sagan said that we're at least as likely to die from an asteroid hitting the earth as from an airplane crash, so we should develop the technology to detect and divert asteroids before they cause devastation on our planet. Who is naive enough not to recognize his self-deception? He starts out with a desire to increase funding for science and research and then contrives reasons that ordinary people might agree with. At least we know how likely it is to die from an airplane crash. Not very likely. Once you develop the technology to deflect asteroids away from earth, the same technology can then be used to deflect them towards us as well. In a society that passively lets spam and malware flourish, this amounts to replacing a known risk (being hit by an asteroid by chance) with an unknown one (sabotage).
Not Carl Sagan, but all scientists think in the same self-deceptive manner all the time. As children, they learned that life is absurd and you can't change society. You can't change people. You just have to accept the inherent flaws in humans. They've given up all their childhood visions of human greatness long ago. It is this dipshit ideology and nothing else that lies at the heart of all things stupid in this world. Have you ever seen anyone else in this world point this out? Tell me about it. I'll prove you wrong. I am the only one.
In a widely publicized discussion in 1988 between Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and Arthur C. Clarke three of the "greatest scientific minds", Hawking expresses concern about making conact with extraerrestrials because it is reminiscent of Europeans meeting American Indians. Says Sagan: We have no choice in the matter. We've been broadcasting TV signals into space since the late 1940's. Says Clarke: I'm an optimist. Malevolent societies most likely self-destruct, so those we are likely to encounter are probably benign.
Do you think the pretty pictures they paint and the happy faces they make are the most absurdly pessimistic imaginable? They're saying strategic actions are impossible because the world is beyond our control (people's deepest convictions are usually never explicitly mentioned). Let's do technology because it has already happened and it will happen anyway. Unless the internet is a conspiracy, I am the only human who holds a vision of humans pursuing strategic science as a single fascist society.