A Net Skeptic's Conservative Manifesto - Reason.com

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, by Evgeny Morozov, Public Affairs, 415 pages, $28.99

Evgeny Morozov’s latest book, To Save Everything, Click Here, follows the same blueprint as his first book, 2011’s The Net Delusion. He takes the over-zealous ramblings of a handful of Internet evangelists, suggests that Pollyannas like them are all around us, and then argues, implausibly, that their very ideas threaten to undermine our culture or humanity in some fashion. Along the way, he doles out generous heapings of unremitting, snarky scorn.

In the earlier book, Morozov used this formula to challenge the hyper-optimism that has infused debates over the Internet’s role in advancing human freedom and even regime change. In To Save Everything, the target is the way people invoke “the Internet” as the cure-all to every problem under the sun.

Morozov rejects the idea that “technology can make us better,” and he rails against “technological solutionism,” defined here as “recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definitive, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized” through algorithms or other digital fixes. These include, among other things, efforts to improve politics and elections through digital transparency, efforts to shore up the publishing business via crowdsourcing, and the use of various self-tracking technologies to monitor and improve our personal health.

He castigates those who would engage in a “mindless pursuit of this silicon Eden,” cautions that “attaining technological perfection, without attending to the intricacies of the human condition and accounting for the complex world of practices and traditions, might not be worth the price,” and argues that solutionism “should be resisted, circumvented, and unlearned.”

Morozov effectively pricks the bubble of irrational exuberance that has always accompanied new digital technologies. But as with his previous book, he refuses to quit while he’s ahead. Instead, he unsuccessfully labors to convince us that the very concept of “the Internet” holds no inherent meaning and that we have all been suffering from a sort of mass delusion about its existence. Worse yet, he offers only a limited and sometimes contradictory roadmap for building a better world and integrating new information technologies into it along the way.

The result is a treatise that is difficult to embrace, despite its sagacious advice not to allow our tools to become ends in and of themselves. Morozov wants to make sure technology never trumps our humanity, but in the process he presents a vision of reality that is virtual at best.

Pummeling the Pollyannas

Morozov’s first mission in the book—one that he generally accomplishes—is to prove that changing the world for the better is damned hard, and that no amount of blustery tech boosterism can solve such difficult problems as overcoming tyrannical rulers, curing disease, reducing crime, ending hunger, or better educating children. With wicked wit and palpable glee, Morozov demolishes simplistic notions that technology is a magical elixir for the world’s worst maladies.

More profoundly, he cautions that the very act of trying to address these problems by reducing them to efficiency-enhancing algorithms is potentially dehumanizing. “We shouldn’t mistake the easy availability of quick technological fixes for their moral desirability,” he argues. No matter what the Net boosters say, good intentions plus cool technology does not always equal positive results.

Morozov’s enemies list in this regard hasn’t changed much since the previous book. There are villains from the business world (Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg), the commentariat (Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly), and the government (former State Department Senior Advisor for Innovation Alex Ross). These and other techno-evangelists earn Morozov’s unrelenting scorn because, he claims, their brand of “Internet-centrism” has “mangled how we think about the past, the present, and the future of technology regulation” and has diverted us “from a more robust debate about digital technologies.”

But Morozov overstates things here considerably. There isn’t any lack of “robust debate” about digital technologies and how to think about or even regulate them. Name just about any information technology you can think of—broadband networks, social networks, email services, ecommerce sites, smartphones and their various apps, geolocation technologies, texting, Twitter—and you’ll find plenty of critics and regulatory proposals.

There has grown in recent years a veritable cottage industry of cyber-cranks who publish a constant stream of books and essays with titles like, “How the Internet is Killing Our [fill in the blank].”  For every pundit guilty of overly exuberant Internet solutionism, you can find another guilty of over-simplified Internet victimization.

Against Technological Determinism