[liberationtech] Terry Winograd and Evgeny Morozov

[Karl Fogel]

Oh gosh, weighing in on a thread about Evgeny Morozov on Liberation Tech
has got to be some kind of apotheosis of trolldom...  But what the heck,
by now everyone who wanted to do Kill-Thread on this in their mailreader
has already done so.  So:

  http://www.rants.org/2013/04/02/morozov_misses/

It's a reaction to Morozov's long (and IMHO wrong, though admittedly
fanatically well-researched) takedown of Tim O'Reilly in The Baffler.
Closing lines, for those who like to taste before they click:

  Tim [O'Reilly] bounces a lot of big ideas around.  Anyone sincerely
  looking for something to criticize could find something useful to say
  (and in many cases Tim would appreciate it, and even change his mind).
  Yet when Morozov gets close to one of these things, he shies away from
  making an effective criticism, and instead opts to make Tim’s ideas
  look bad through shallow, associative analysis, without saying
  outright what would be a better idea.  Morozov provides no
  constructive analysis; he wants someone to be wrong, but he doesn’t
  particularly care what’s right.  This is just Andrew Breitbart for
  intellectuals.

  Big ideas have porous boundaries, but that isn’t the same as being
  meaningless.  A good critic recognizes the useful big ideas, and after
  puncturing them helps define their boundaries better, or else counters
  with other ideas — puts something on the line, actually comes out and
  says something capable of being refuted.  Morozov never takes the
  second steps.  He plants seeds of doubt, but takes no responsibility
  for the crop that results.

'Nuff said.