Words matter. These are the best Evgeny Morozov Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
‘Solutionism’ for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection – by means of technology – without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.
There is no doubt that the Internet brims with spamming, scamming and identity fraud. Having someone wipe out your hard drive or bank account has never been easier, and the tools for committing electronic mischief on your enemies are cheap and widely accessible.
Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.
To me, the success of the cyberactivists in Tunisia is actually very interesting, because many of them explicitly rejected any support from Washington.
There is this huge Roma problem in Europe. There are a lot of Romas who are discriminated against in countries like the Czech Republic or Hungary. They are an ethnic minority that in Europe everyone loves to hate.
The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.
The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside.
In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.
Would you like all of your Facebook friends to sift through your trash? A group of designers from Britain and Germany think that you might. Meet BinCam: a ‘smart’ trash bin that aims to revolutionize the recycling process.
When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen – that’s a direct quote – it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.
A faithful lifehacker would use technology to avoid dead time and move on to the entertaining, more gratifying activities as soon as possible.
Much of the real computer talent today is concentrated in the private sector.
We need to start seeing privacy as a commons – as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.
There are good reasons why we don’t want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly.
Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it’s probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don’t see any big political consequences out of that.
It is true that authoritarian governments increasingly see the Internet as a threat in part because they see the U.S. government behind the Internet.
If WikiLeaks were a for-profit company, determining its real value would be a nearly impossible task.
This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.
As befits Silicon Valley, ‘big data’ is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans – and credit histories – to millions of people who currently lack access to them.
Cybercriminals are usually driven by profit, while cyberterrorists are driven by ideology.
There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse ‘civic’ and ‘civil,’ and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.
It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.
If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public – the authorities show up and arrest everyone.
Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever.
There is something almost sacred about the Internet. I’m trying to secularize it.
I don’t think love for technology itself breeds change.
I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.
The bigger the network, the harder it is to leave. Many users find it too daunting to start afresh on a new site, so they quietly consent to Facebook’s privacy bullying.
I’m active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle.
We’ve never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It’s been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they’re always the enemy.
However revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn’t altered the basic law of human communication: Being nice to your interlocutors is a good way to start any negotiations, particularly, when being hostile is an open invitation for a cyber-fight.
My hunch is that people often affiliate with causes online for selfish and narcissistic purposes. Sometimes, it may be as simple as trying to impress their online friends, and once you have fashioned that identity, there is very little reason to actually do anything else.
If you use your smart toothbrush, the data can be immediately sent to your dentist and your insurance company, but it also allows someone from the NSA to know what was in your mouth three weeks ago.
Calling China’s online censorship system a ‘Great Firewall’ is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.
If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it’s not really obvious where we would be. So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.
Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.
Faster roads are not always safer roads – and virtually all societies, democratic or authoritarian, prefer safety over speed, even if many of their citizens enjoy fast driving.
Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.
In business, standards establish the rules of the game, creating path dependencies as investments are made and corresponding designs are set in stone and plastic. Inferior standards can prevail due to smart marketing or industry collusion.
I want to prevent us reifying ‘the Internet’ as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American Constitution as it was written.
Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions.
The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters.
Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time – so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?
Surveillance cameras might reduce crime – even though the evidence here is mixed – but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.
In short, Google prefers a world where we consistently go to three restaurants to a world where our choices are impossible to predict.
Technological defeatism – a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there’s nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms – is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We’ll come to pay for it very dearly.
My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an Internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as ‘the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.’
Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.
I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.
It’s true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call ‘moral panics,’ that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.
The newspaper offers something very different from Google’s aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.
If China’s expansion into Africa and Russia’s into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley’s ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
Whether greater cybersecurity requires a greater sacrifice of our digital freedoms is an important debate that we should be having, preferably with all the facts in front of us.
Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.
A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don’t understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook.
Apple has an opening to say, ‘The tools we are selling to you will enable you to do things rather than do things for you.’ Google’s vision is tools that will do things for you.
Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google.
Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of ‘open government’; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.
Russian young people spend countless hours online downloading videos and having a very nice digital entertainment lifestyle, which does not necessarily turn them into the next Che Guevara.
Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn’t.
The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively.
The message I’m trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology – they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.
Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate.
The Internet can empower groups whose aims are in fact antithetical to democracy.
I spent two years in Palo Alto – what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don’t care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups – and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA – which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier.
