Evgeny Morozov is the new enfant terrible of the tech world. A fierce critique of cyber utopianism, the belarus-born argues that the Internet is not going to save the world and that Silicon Valley is getting a kind of power that used to be exclusive of politics. He claims that 'We are abandoning all the checks and balances' : ‘We did not elect them to help us solve our problems. 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.’ (Morozov, 2013)
In his first book, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World, Morozov argued against the belief that the Internet is going to set us free, for two main reasons. The fisrt one is that social media are not just a democratizing tool, but also a powerful weapon for authoritarian regimes:
‘One gloomy day in 2009, the young Belarusian activist Pavel Lyashkovich learned the dangers of excessive social networking the hard way. A freshman at a public university in Minsk, he was unexpectedly called to the dean’s office, where he was met by two suspicious-looking men who told him they worked for the KGB, one public organization that the Belarusian authorities decided not to rename even after the fall of communism (they’re a brand-conscious bunch).
The KGB officers asked Pavel all sorts of detailed questions about his trips to Poland and Ukraine as well as his membership in various antigovernment movements.
Their extensive knowledge of the internal affairs of the Belarusian opposition – and particularly of Pavel’s own involvement in them, something he didn’t believe to be common knowledge – greatly surprised him. But then it all became clear, when the KGB duo loaded his page on vkontakte.ru, a popular Russian social networking site, pointing out that he was listed as a “friend” by a number of well-known oppositional activists. Shortly thereafter, the visitors offered Lyashkovich to sign an informal “cooperation agreement” with their organization. He declined – which may eventually cost him dearly, as many students sympathetic to the opposition and unwilling to cooperate with authorities have been expelled from universities in the past. We will never know how many other new suspects the KGB added to its list by browsing Lyashkovich’s profile. (Morozov, 2011:155)
The second is that, even if living in authoritarian regimes, most people with internet acess wont search for ‘how to do a revolution’ but most probably for the same as we do in the West:
‘In 2007, a group of wealthy geeks in the West volunteered to lend their computer bandwidth to people in countries with repressive regimes in the hope – the confident hope – they’d soon educate themselves about the horrors of their various regimes. Instead, they promptly went in search of pictures of Gwen Stefani in her underwear and Britney Spears out of it.’
In his second book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov’s target is mainly Silicon Valley and the way big corporations as Google are designing a future we didn't chose. The journalist turned academic criticizes what he calls ‘solutionism’, the idea that the world needs fixing and that technology will do it, mainly trough... apps: ‘Solutionists err by assuming, rather than investigating, the problems they set out to tackle. Given Silicon Valley’s digital hammers, all problems start looking like nails, and all solutions like apps.’
For Morozov, the main problem is that life is supposed to be made of right and wrong decisions: failure is important in progress, error in problem-solving:
‘Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley. Whatever their contribution to our maturity as human beings, decisions also bring out pain and, faced with a choice between maturity and pain-minimization, Silicon Valley has chosen the latter — perhaps as a result of yet another instant poll.’
Morozov is definitely not the typical academic: although a fierce critic of Silicon Valley is he’s invited to talks in Google. His books are bestsellers and his fights on Twitter with some of his cyber-enemies quite funny.
I am also a fan of his chapters names, like “Orwell’s favorite lolcat” or “Why the KGB wants you to join Facebook”.
