[liberationtech] On Evgeny Morozov | Boston Review

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January 03, 2014

On Evgeny Morozov

by Joshua Cohen, Boston Review

Evgeny Morozov, a contributing editor at Boston Review, is a
compulsive problematizer. I hate that word “problematizer,” but it
leaps to mind when I think about Evgeny, who is the focus of a new
profile by Michael Meyer in the Columbia Journalism Review. (In the
name of the overrated value of transparency, I should say that Evgeny
is a friend, though as you will see from the profile, I am not a
cheerleader. I think he is curmudgeonly to a fault, and think that the
criticism he practices is easier than the construction he should.)

Maybe a better way to say it is that Evgeny is a question-man, not an
answer-man. He asks lots of very important questions in service of
skepticism: not exactly skepticism about technology, but a sharply
critical skepticism about some—as he sees it—widespread, unthinking,
and humanly damaging ways of writing and talking about technology,
especially information and communication technology.

Boston Review published many of Evgeny’s early long-form essays,
beginning with “Texting Toward Utopia,” which took on the then-popular
assumption that the Internet is a powerful force for spreading
democracy. He also wrote, more than two years ago, about the
“backdoor” surveillance infrastructure being built as part of the war
on terror. In “Passing Through, Why the Open Internet is Worth
Saving,” he wrote in support of “net neutrality,” while trying to
rescue it from some of its friends.

Evgeny is also the author of two important books: The Net Delusion:
The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs, 2011) and, most
recently, To Save Everything, Click Here (PublicAffairs, 2013).

The Net Delusion (building on the arguments in “Texting Toward
Utopia”) provided a sustained critique of some extravagant claims
about the Internet’s political promise. The Internet, you may recall,
was going to be the great solvent of authoritarian rule: the
technology of freedom that would enable people to escape from the
controlled communication, thus controlled thought and conduct,
associated with authoritarianism. In 1999, George Bush said: “imagine
if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread.”
In 2009, Andrew Sullivan said—in reference to Iran’s Green
Revolution—“the revolution will be twittered.” And not just that:
Wikipedia provided a model for decentralized, team collaboration. Why
not Wiki-government? The Internet would not only unmake
authoritarianism: it would remake democracy.

Evgeny’s first book was a powerful dissent from this cyber-utopian
outlook: described byThe Economist as “a provocative, enlightening and
welcome riposte to the cyber-utopian worldview.” I think it is fair to
say that that worldview has fewer proponents now. Many more people
realize that authoritarians are not all-thumbs when it comes to
information technology; that communication is not the same as
concerted action; and that most people go online for less elevated
purposes than overthrowing authoritarian rule or fostering more
participatory governance. There may be a delta, but it is not obvious
how big it is.

To Save Everything, Click Here is also critical: not exclusively, but
principally. The target of Evgeny’s criticism is an “amelioration
orgy” that he associates with Silicon Valley. “In the past few years,”
Evgeny says, “Silicon Valley’s favorite slogan has quietly changed
from ‘Innovate or Die’ to ‘Ameliorate or Die.’” The book describes,
powerfully and in insightful detail, a series of projects of
amelioration: self-tracking devices that provide remedies for obesity,
insomnia, heavy carbon footprints, and the limitations of memory.
Information and communication strategies for remedying political
corruption, hypocrisy, opacity, and all the hurdles to informed civic
engagement. Algorithms that help us figure out what to read and where
to eat. Information technology solutions for preempting crime, keeping
the jerks out of the clubs, helping the needy while having fun,
connecting with distant strangers while distancing from connected
neighbors. You get the idea—though to really get it you need to read
the book. (That said, the book is not really about Silicon Valley: it
has more references to Jane McGonigal than to Steve Jobs. It is really
about the assumptions of some intellectuals who write about
information technology.)

The Net Delusion criticized the idea that new communication
technologies would serve the emancipatory goal that proponents said
they would serve. It focused on the effectiveness of the means in
achieving the ends. To Save Everything is about ends, not means.
Assume for the sake of argument, he says, that the ameliorative orgy
ends in boundless success: obesity conquered; jerks out of the good
clubs; bad guys incapacitated; politics cleansed of hypocrisy and
opacity; forgetfulness solved; carbon footprints reduced; assistance
to the needy turned into a fun game.

What could be wrong with that? Two things. Evgeny challenges the orgy
of amelioration, first, by arguing that the ameliorative solutions
often turn public problems into private ones: don’t regulate the
content of food; give people enough information to nudge them to
better personal choices. They promise success by first diminishing the
magnitude of the problem. Second, he celebrates the virtues of our
vices. Some of life’s good things come from ignorance rather than
knowledge; opacity rather than transparency; ambivalence rather than
certainty; vagueness rather than precision; hypocrisy rather than
sincerity; messy inefficiency rather than tidiness; good enough rather
than perfect; time-consuming, indecisive, head-holding pondering
rather than algorithmic offloading or gamified nudges.

Evgeny is not alone in these ideas. La Rochefoucauld famously
celebrated hypocrisy as the homage that vice pays to virtue. But
Evgeny does not think he has much company in Silicon Valley (at least
as he imagines it). The problem is that his Silicon-Valley-of-the-mind
suffers from (and spreads to others) the ideological blinder of
solutionism, aided and abetted by its companion blinder of
Internet-centrism. Those blinders fuel the ameliorative orgy—an orgy
of fixing, in which the tools for fixing help to define (often by
diminishing) what needs to be fixed in the first place. So we need to
“unlearn solutionism” and the limits it imposes on our thinking in
order even to ask whether all the technological amelioration is “worth
the price.”

If you are wondering what “solutionism” amounts to, and want to start
down your own path of unlearning, you would do well to begin with
Terry Winograd’s interview with Evgeny, “What’s Wrong with
Technological Fixes?”

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