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To Save Everything, Click Here 3/C PMS (BLACK C, 185, 7499),GLOSSY LAMINATION + SPOT SUPER GRITTY MATTE UV + DEBOSS POLITICS / TECHNOLOGY TO S $28.99 / $32.00 CAN OR “ For the brilliant dissident Evgeny Morozov, computers are like broken beach-toys on the TH EVGENY MOROZOV U A dark, historic tides of power politics. His new book should be bound in sandpaper and ....... THE F —— BRUCE STERLING, author of IN THE VERY NEAR FUTURE, O used to abrade the works of other Internet pundits.” Y “smart” technologies and “big data” will allow TES T he Hacker Crackdown A The Folly of Technological Solutionism OUR C us to make large-scale and sophisticated inter- O O T VE EVERTHING O “ This hard-hitting book argues people have become enslaved to the machines they use PH ventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. to communicate. It is incisive and beautifully written; whether you agree with Morozov Technology will allow us to solve problems in EVGENY MOROZOV or not, he will make you think hard.” —— RICHARD SENNETT, author of The Craftsman highly original ways and create new incentives (@evgenymorozov) is the author of The Net “ Evgeny Morozov calls himself a ‘digital heretic,’ and he is right to do so. Against the to get more people to do the right thing. But Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, reigning consensus—that there is a digital fix for every social and political problem, and how will such “solutionism” affect our society, a New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and that thanks to the technologies that we group together for convenience’s sake as the once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable winner of Harvard’s Kennedy School’s 2012 Internet, the brave new world of the future will be one of endless, limitless improvement dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and Goldsmith Book Prize. He is a contributing in every realm of life—Morozov offers a sophisticated, eloquent, and definitive rebuttal. Technological ‘solutionism,’ he argues, is the romantic utopia of our age, and, like easily manageable matters of technological editor to The New Republic. His articles have Communism or the free market fantasies of Reagan and Thatcher before it, it is one efficiency? What if some such problems are appeared in the New York Times, the Financial more god doomed to fail. In our ahistorical, gadget obsessed, and self-regarding age, simply vices in disguise? What if some friction Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Morozov’s skeptical, modest humanism will doubtless engender fierce resistance. But TO SAVE in communication is productive and some the London Review of Books, and many other then, that is the tribute that self-delusion has always paid to reason. Voltairean in its hypocrisy in politics necessary? The tempta- publications. His monthly column comes out lucidity, To Save Everything, Click Here is not just a brilliant book, it is a necessary one.” —— DaVID RIEFF, author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis tion of the digital age is to fix everything— in Slate, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Ger- from crime to corruption to pollution to many), El Pais (Spain), Corriere della Sera “ When it comes to anything ‘internet’ related, Evgeny Morozov is the writer who brings us , CLICK obesity—by digitally quantifying, tracking, or (Italy), and several other newspapers. He back to earth. Lubricated by snake oil, too much of what we read about the internet and EVERYTHING, gamifying behavior. But when we change the was born in Belarus. the possibilities offered by modern technology is hypertext hyperbole. In this riotous read, Morozov continues his quest to restore empirical rationality in our own thinking motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic about our techno-utopian pipe-dreams. We have become gullible to what Morozov calls behavior we may also change the very nature solutionism, the idea that whatever complex situation we face, we can solve it simply by of that behavior. Technology, Evgeny Morozov finding the right algorithm, and thanks to technology we can find a solution. We have seen this before, with Condorcet and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, but then, as proposes, can be a force for improvement— now, too much reliance on mathematics when we are dealing with problems of people and but only if we keep solutionism in check and society leads inevitably to failure. Today, we who live, work, and dream in cyberspace need learn to appreciate the imperfections of lib- ——TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES, Morozov to keep our feet firmly planted on Terra Firma.” Here eral democracy. Some of those imperfections president of the Republic of Estonia JACKET DESIGN BY PETE GARCEAU are not accidental but by design. Arguing that we badly need a new, post- $28.99 / $32.00 CAN EVGENY MOROZOV Internet way to debate the moral conse- quences of digital technologies, To Save Every- AV AILABLE AS AN E-BOOK thing, Click Here warns against a world of VISIT WWW.PUBLICAFFAIRSBOOKS.COM CLICK seamless efficiency, where everyone is forced Here FOLLOW US ON TWITTER WWW.PUBLICAFFAIRSBOOKS.COM to wear Silicon Valley’s digital straitjacket. SPOT SUPER GRITTY INDICATED ON PAGE 2 DEBOSS INDICATED ON PAGE 3 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page i TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page ii 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page iii TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE THE FOLLY OF TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONISM EVGENY MOROZOV PublicAffairs • New York 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page iv Copyright © 2013 by Evgeny Morozov. Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107. PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk pur- chases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organiza- tions. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Book Design by Pauline Brown Typeset in 11.5 point Adobe Garamond Pro by the Perseus Books Group The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: [TK] ISBN 978-1-61039-138-2 (HC) ISBN 978-1-61039-139-9 (EB) First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page v To my parents 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page vi 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page vii Contents Introduction vii CHAPTER ONE Solutionism and Its Discontents 1 CHAPTER TWO TheNonsense of “the Internet”— 17 and How to Stop It CHAPTER THREE So Open It Hurts 63 CHAPTER FOUR How to Break Politics by Fixing It 100 CHAPTER FIVE The Perils of Algorithmic Gatekeeping 140 CHAPTER SIX Less Crime, More Punishment 181 CHAPTER SEVEN Galton’s iPhone 226 CHAPTER EIGHT The Superhuman Condition 268 CHAPTER NINE Smart Gadgets, Dumb Humans 318 Postscript 353 Notes 359 Acknowledgments 397 Index 399 vii 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page viii 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page ix Introduction “In an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost.” —Aldous Huxley “Complexity is a solvable problem in the right hands.” —Jeff Jarvis ilicon Valley is guilty of many sins, but lack of ambition is not Sone of them. If you listen to its loudest apostles, Silicon Valley is all about solving problems that someone else—perhaps the greedy bankers on Wall Street or the lazy know-nothings in Washington— have created. “Technology is not really about hardware and software any more. It’s really about the mining and use of this enormous data to make the world a better place,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, told an audience of MIT students in 2011. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who argues that his company’s mission is to “make the world more open and connected,” concurs. “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” he proclaimed just a few months before his company’s rapidly plummeting stock convinced all but its most die-hard fans that Facebook and making money had parted ways long ago. What, then, gets Mr. Zuckerberg out of bed? As he told the audience of the South by Southwest festival in 2008, it’s the desire to solve global problems. “There are a lot of really big issues for the world to get solved and, as a company, what we are trying to do is to ix 9781610391382-text_morozov 12/13/12 4:10 PM Page x Introduction build an infrastructure on top of which to solve some of these prob- lems,” announced Zuckerberg. In the last few years, Silicon Valley’s favorite slogan has quietly changed from “Innovate or Die!” to “Ameliorate or Die!” In the grand scheme of things, what exactly is being improved is not very important; being able to change things, to get humans to behave in more responsible and sustainable ways, to maximize efficiency, is all that matters. Half-baked ideas that might seem too big even for the naïfs at TED Conferences—that Woodstock of the intel- lectual effete—sit rather comfortably on Silicon Valley’s business plans. “Fitter, happier, more productive”—the refreshingly depressive motto of the popular Radiohead song from the mid-1990s—would make for an apt welcome sign in the corporate headquarters of its many digital mavens.
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