[liberationtech] On Evgeny Morozov | Boston Review

[Andrea St]

I agree with Joshua and i enjoyed his piece.



Il giorno venerdì 3 gennaio 2014, Yosem Companys ha scritto:

> 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?”
>
>
> http://www.bostonreview.net/blog/joshua-cohen-evgeny-morozov#.UscRGAts2e8.twitter
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-- 
Andrea Stroppa
http://huffingtonpost.com/andrea-stroppa
@andst7
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