Evgeny Morozov

Morozov’s excellent first book, The Net Delusion, established him as a major critic of internet eschatology, particularly the utopian brand. His latest book attempts to expand on that critique, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. (Insert joke about sophomore efforts and snark here.) For a sample mostly taken from the book, here’s Morozov on why we shouldn’t be sanguine about using technology to “improve” incarceration. A good sampling of Morozov’s work is available online; show more I would recommend avoiding his debate with Farhad Manjoo in Slate, where Morozov mostly ignores legitimate hits (he attacks generalizations like “the internet” but himself has no trouble criticizing “Silicon Valley”) in favor of snide near-ad hominems.

Morozov wouldn’t be surprised that I, as an internet reviewer (“ordinary people don’t write reviews for the same reasons as professional critics; they are mostly interested in reviewing their own experience, not in making sense of a given work”), can’t improve on Kevin Driscoll’s take in the LA Review of Books, which has some very smart things to say about Morozov’s critiques of “solutionism” (social issues as problems with a fixed solution rather than approaches that have to be negotiated and compromised on) and internet-centrism. [Side note on that Internet reviewer thing--there's a very interesting piece to be written here bringing in Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and a discussion of what "making sense of a given work" might mean.] For a rather harsher view, there’s Tim Wu, who is attacked in the book and understandably annoyed; his criticisms are not unwarranted.

Morozov is a skeptic not just of whether Silicon Valley’s big promises can be carried out but, more importantly, whether they should be. Friction, lack of transparency, inefficiency, and so on are not just hinderers of efficiency, but crucial parts of human self-definition and autonomy; politics isn’t politics if it’s not messy and a bit hypocritical. Compromises and imperfections can be good, not bad; politics can’t be improved the same way that market transactions can be—if all interactions could be win-win, we wouldn’t have politics. “Try telling [an Amazon] shopper that not all of his or her desires can be satisfied because someone else has equally compelling interests and those have to be taken into account as well; the market simply doesn’t work that way.” And the consumerist mentality that solutionists bring to political challenges leads to disappointment and disgust with “politics,” when it should lead to a rejection of solutionism: “Most public institutions should not be held to the same standards as their private counterparts because their mission is to provide goods and services that markets cannot or should not provide.” More generally, inefficiencies, hypocrisies, and the existence of crime “might be problematic in some limited sense, but they do not necessarily add up to a problem worth solving—any more than having a soccer match that lasts for ninety minutes rather than an eternity and features twenty-two people instead of everyone at the stadium is a problem to be solved.”

Relatedly, the “frictionless” solutions promoted by techno-utopians often don’t solve the problems they purport to, and they don’t solve them in particular ways reflecting existing political and social inequalities. For example, biometric identification technologies turn out to have particular trouble with certain racial groups, and fingerprint scanners have difficulty with people in certain working-class occupations--not that this is anything new, as Morozov is at pains to point out. (See also the way in which visual communications technology is bound up in whiteness: Richard Dyer, "Making 'White' People White, in The Social Shaping of Technology, eds. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (noting that, among other things, videotape quality was evaluated by how well it displayed a blank, pale orange signal called "skin" that was supposed to match white skin); Brian Winston, A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image, Daedalus, Vol. 114, No. 4, The Moving Image (Fall, 1985), pp. 105-123 (discussing how, at every stage, film development was guided by how it did at showing white skin).)

For another example, massive online open courses, Morozov, as many others have done, points out that what they offer isn’t individual contact with an expert (even a grad student) but rather something else, and they don’t exist in a political vacuum: “In promising almost immediate and much cheaper results, they can easily undermine support for more ambitious, more intellectually stimulating, but also more demanding reform projects.” Algorithms to recommend books to you have their biases, but that’s nothing compared to the dangers of algorithms that predict crime based on current circumstances (including poverty and racism that mean that crimes are committed and detected in particular ways). And design that simply prevents the possibility of crime also often prevents the possibility of civil disobedience, an important driver of social change: “Sometimes being caught with marijuana in one’s pocket is better than being prevented from putting it there, simply because an arrest is likely to generate media attention and trigger a public debate about drug laws.” But he’s always context-sensitive, and not dismissive of all better living through technology—anti-drunk-driving technology might be a good idea even if other technological interventions aren’t.

I was reminded of Morozov’s critique of big data solutionism by this bit in Slate about how facts can change their meanings when you have more context:

Marti Barletta, a consultant in marketing to women, told me one of the reasons women have gained a reputation for caring about frivolous details is because they do so much research. By the time they arrive at dealerships, they’ve already logged countless hours online finding cars that satisfy their main criteria. Now, they’re picking through minutiae—what, precisely, makes the Nissan Maxima better than the Toyota Camry? (Could it be the number of cup holders?) These questions, Barletta says, contribute to an impression among salesmen that women care mostly about the little stuff.

This is a good example of the point that “data-driven solutions” can’t ever be entirely data-driven: you always need a theory.

Morozov also constantly emphasizes that people construct technologies. There’s nothing inevitable about the configuration of “the internet,” or “Facebook” or “Google” for that matter. Facebook could limit the number of ads it shows; Google could write different algorithms. As Tarleton Gillespie insightfully noted, Twitter’s algorithm for picking trending topics favors breadth (many groups using the same hashtag) over depth (a united group using the hashtag a lot), which is a political design choice that can be contested. When we focus on current numbers, such as monitoring how much water we consume, we may be motivated to take individual action but we don’t understand or consider the complex systems of overall water consumption, and we aren’t challenged to think of how we might get a different set of numbers—Morozov wants our technologies to confound and challenge us.

This is an important reminder, but it leads Morozov to be highly critical of activist discourses around things like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA’s “don’t break the internet” advocacy, and here (like many of his reviewers) I think he somewhat misses the mark. Very few of the leaders, and I suspect very few of the followers, of the anti-SOPA/PIPA/ACTA protests believed that http and IP addresses and the like would disappear under SOPA/PIPA/ACTA etc. Rather, they believed that key features of the internet they knew and liked would be hampered if not destroyed. The “internet” that existed, they thought, would be similar to the “Medicare” that would exist if what we now call Medicare were replaced by a voucher system. It’s fair game in such a debate to say that “Medicare” would be destroyed by such a change; it’s even fair game to say that “marriage” would be destroyed by extending it to women who want to marry women, even if that’s a dumb argument on its own merits. Yes, of course we should often question definitions, where much of the important rhetorical work is getting done, and Morozov is right to point that out—but many of the people he accuses really do know that already, and have made it pretty clear that they do.

(He’s particularly unfair, it seems to me, to Jonathan Zittrain, whose The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It comes under attack for internet-centrism and quixotic desire to keep the internet in a single state forever. E.g, Morozov says “to claim that Apple—one of Zittrain’s culprits—is bad for innovation because it’s bad for ‘the Internet’ is like claiming that ‘the Internet’ is bad for innovation because it’s bad for the telephone. Well, it might have been bad for the telephone—but when did preservation of the telephone become a lofty social goal?” Yet a significant chunk of Zittrain’s book is devoted precisely to addressing questions of when we can say a technological configuration/change in the direction of greater or lesser centralized control is a good thing. Zittrain isn’t entirely successful, I think, but by failing to acknowledge his explicit attempts to grapple with Morozov’s points, Morozov makes it seem as if Zittrain were silly or hypocritical, and himself ends up fighting a straw man. This ungenerosity isn’t unique in the book. Later, for example, Morozov suggests that those who favor market transactions trading private data for material benefits as mutually beneficial must also therefore approve torture “provided the prisoners ‘strike the right deal’ and are well compensated,” whatever that might mean.)

Morozov is at his best discussing tradeoffs and political reactions to technology: greater access to information can be manipulated by governments just like other new forms of power can be, and if—which is not yet established—there is a link between the two, he’s right that it’s not clear that the “local politics in Bahía Blanca [Argentina] [should] make sacrifices so that a fifteen-year-old in Palo Alto can remix cat videos without going to jail.” He doesn’t want that fifteen-year-old to go to jail, but he also doesn’t want arguments for that remixer’s protection to prevent any tinkering with technologies to make them “safer,” for some politically chosen definition of safer, especially since private parties and nondemocratic states are willing to tinker anyway.

Some have found his attack on extreme self-monitoring technologies and technologists, who are really outliers, to be a bit much, but I really liked his point (again, not new, but well made) that there is a deep political problem with proposing self-monitoring as the solution to the barrage of advertising and subsidies that keep us eating terrible, unhealthy food: “yes, some of us might find ingenious engineering solutions to resist insidious marketing, but in all this celebration of modern technology, shouldn’t we also do something about the marketing itself? …. [P]olitical action all but disappears; rather than reforming the system, we just tinker with ourselves and tend to our reservoirs of willpower the way Swiss bankers tend to their vaults.” But Morozov also hates “nudging” via technical or legal structures, even though that’s pretty much the opposite of the individualistic solutions he condemns, because he wants us all to think deeply, and exhaustingly, about all our politically relevant choices, which is to say basically all of them, though he talks most about energy consumption.

Probably Morozov’s most effective assault is on the concept of “openness” as an unqualified good. Because of preexisting political struggles, “open” data will be used in politically inflected ways—for example, maps that visualize crime statistics across different neighborhoods could help improve police effectiveness, but they could also devalue properties and make people living in dodgy neighborhoods to be less willing to report crimes. Openness has feedback effects. Likewise, digitization of land records in India, in an attempt to empower the weak, may have benefited the rich and powerful by exposing which occupants lacked formal title despite being morally and even legally owners. Morozov advocates for context-specific solutions—here, accepting other methods of proving title such as old family photos or maps along with official land titles, or selectively limiting access to land records so that people with “no obvious need” to see them can’t do so. Information, he argues, should be “collected and distributed in full awareness of the social and cultural complexity of the institutional environment in which it is gathered. Sometimes preserving the social relations that enable that environment to exist … might require producing data that is only half transparent or half accessible …. [D]emocracy thrives on compromise and the art of reconciling seemingly irreconcilable interests.” And it’s hard to disagree with that last point, whatever excesses are in the rest of the book. show less

The Net Delusion is powerful, and it gains power as it rolls through its 320 pages. It took quite a while to lock me in; the first hundred pages gave me little I didn't already know. I admit I began to get fidgety, but the next couple of hundred pages gave me a ton of insight, building on what came before. The structure of it all is therefore quite impressive, as is the research. Morosov seems to have looked at essentially everything, prying a single, highly targeted quote from most sources. show more The result is a very inclusive and empirically supported shot at the Alice in Wonderland world of the internet as dictator-killer. The pace quickens, the momentum builds. It becomes a compelling read. Bravo, Morosov.

I particularly appreciated the view from the other side - of the ocean, of the rose-colored glasses, of the political spectrum. For example, Morosov says that as other countries develop their own social networking and search services (if only to keep track of their own potentially troublesome citizens), the Googles and Facebooks the US offers are being seen more and more as digital versions of Halliburton and Exxon. That's a perspective that should be shaking things up at Google, which portrays itself as the good guys from every conceivable angle.

Morosov wraps it up with a call for perspective - historical perspective. We will not change human nature with the internet, because nothing ever has, and the internet is just another technology that will fail to make critical changes - like telegraph, telephone, radio, and tv. And without knowing the past and the present, we have no business making naive prognostications about Twitter saving Iran - which clearly is not happening - or China suddenly rising up because of Amazon's department store on the net. It's a cold shower of important perspective. It needed to be said, and I can't imagine it being better said than it is in The Net Delusion show less

Morozov is on a crusade against 'Internetic-centric foreign policy' and 'cyber-utopianism', which he describes as a constellation of power interests linking Silicon Valley tech companies (Google, Twitter, Facebook) with Cold Warriors (Cheney, Clinton, Rumsfeld) in a profoundly misguided and dangerous effort to promote democracy overseas through technology. He argues that rather than being an unalloyed force for freedom, the internet can be used in many ways that strengthen authoritarian show more regimes.

The evidence for that last claim is overwhelming: I doubt a single case of 'internet abuse' between 2005 and 2010 has been left out of the book. For that first claim, that the tech companies and Cold Warriors are in alliance, Morozov's evidence is much more hand-wavey. A few speeches, a few NSA sponsored trips, some conference reports.

What this book does not have, and what it really needs, is a theory to organize these disparate elements into a coherent whole. Political power and the governance of internet technologies are complex issues, but the role of the public intellectual to render these complex issues, if not simple, at least comprehensible. Morozov gestures at the fact that the tools used to crack down on pedophiles, terrorists, media piracy, and spam in the West are the same tools used to crack down on activists and dissidents in authoritarians regimes, but he doesn't explain what this conflict means for those of us who would enjoy both a free world and an orderly internet. Likewise, he doesn't address why some states are 'democracies' and some states are 'authoritarian'. Sure, the US just throws Code Pink activists out of Senate hearings while Russia murders journalists, but why is some power legitimate and some illegal?

Most tellingly, for someone who is all about promoting 'cyber-realism', he is blurry on the specifics of what should be done (aside from localizing policy-which leads to embarrassing situations like the tweets from the US Embassy in Egypt). These days, both democracies and authoritarian regimes use the internet for the same reason they use trucks to transport soldiers, or have their citizens breath air; it'd be impossible not to. But a covert organization has different information strategies from a mass protest, and a mass protest is different from a revolutionary army or transitional government.

This lack of theory exacerbates the other problem with a lack of theoretical perspective; the inability to incorporate new information. This book was published in 2011, which means it was probably written in 2010, but Morozov hasn't substantially updated his thinking to include the Arab Spring and divergent outcomes in Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Syria etc. (the fact that they're different might mean that he's right, but still, they all occurred simultaneously...) Wikileaks barely gets a mention, despite the diplomatic cable leaks beginning in February 2010. If there was a theory to The Net Delusion, you could ask how new information fits into or changes the framework. Even in a popular book that is less rigorous than an academic treatise, you need to do more to contextualize your ideas than wave at Foucault, Langdon Winner, George F. Kennan and so on. show less

This is a really important book that should be a third shorter. Shorn of the repetitive insistence that the internet is not all good, Morozov marshals impressive evidence for his thesis. It’s a version of Kranzberg’s first law of technology: the internet is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. But Morozov doesn’t spend much time on the “good” part, considering that internet exceptionalists have gone too far in that direction already.

Morozov argues that proponents of freeing show more populations via the internet seduce Western elites into thinking that democratization will be cheap, easy and automatic, thus distracting from debate over interventions that might actually be of some use. Worse, by touting the disruptive potential of the internet, those same Western elites convince dictators to ramp up their control of the internet to make sure that liberalization doesn’t happen. By giving public credit to Twitter for unrest in Iran and Egypt, Americans ensured that American internet resources would be inherently suspect in authoritarian nations from here on out. As he points out, “it’s hard to think of a state that actually didn’t surive the challenges posed by the [internet] dilemma. Save for North Korea, all authoritarian states have accepted the Internet, with China having more Internet users than there are people in the United States.”

Authoritarians aren’t dumb, and they have plenty of useful strategies at hand. They can implement context-sensitive filters so that people can shop but not engage in political activism. They can use Facebook’s social graph to target activists (and Facebook is all too willing to turn over any necessary information) and ensure that suspicious people/sites are automatically and selectively filtered out. They can use cheap technology to substitute for expensive, fallible, and occasionally sympathetic government employees doing surveillance and thus cover more ground. They can use SMS to collect information on where ethnic minorities are so as to more easily massacre them. They can support DDoS attacks on critical sites (he discusses Livejournal as well as a Saudi Arabian philosophy site with far fewer resources at its disposal).

They can astroturf the web to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, as well as creating a public image of a regime with huge popular support. Here’s an article on China’s huge and decentralized array of paid web commenters posting the party line. “In countries where even ardent supporters of democratizaiton are often paranoid about foreign intervention, all it takes to discredit a blogger is to accuse her of being funded by the CIA, MI6, or Mossad …. If that accusation is repeated by a hundred other bloggers—even if some of them look rather dubious—most sane critics of the government think twice before reposting that blogger’s critical message.” Saudi Arabia boasts a “well-coordinated group of two hundred culturally conservative users” who monitor all Saudi Arabia-related videos posted on YouTube and flag the ones they don’t like. Avoiding YouTube is a possibility, but not a very good one: “Faced with the painful choice between scale and control, activists usually choose the former, surrendering full control over their chosen platform” and risking unpredictable takedowns. The resultant uncertainty deters too much investment in digital activism, because users have to fear Facebook/Google’s reactions as well as their governments’.

He fears that access to Western entertainment, which will get through more easily than other more political messages, will only dilute pressure for reform, and uses the example of East German access to West German television: as it turned out, many East Germans didn’t believe the Western news they received, in part because they didn’t recognize the uninformed portrayal of East Germany as corresponding to their own lives, “while the extensive propaganda of their own government made them expect that Western news, too, was heavily shaped by the government.” In fact, East Germans who received Western television “were, overall, more satisfied and content with the regime; the ones who could not receive Western television … were much more politicized, more critical of the regime, and, most interestingly, more likely to apply for exit visas.”

“If anything,” he argues, “the Internet makes it harder, not easier, to get people to care, if only because the alternatives to political action are so much more pleasant and risk-free.” So you “like” a Facebook group about saving Darfur but don’t show up to a local government meeting where you might actually have a chance of changing policy. While Wikipedia and some other Internet innovations allow distributed participation, “you can’t simply join a revolution any time you want, contribute a comma to a random revolutionary decree, rephrase the guillotine manual, and then slack off for months.” Nor can you start with protests and figure out demands later; knowing what you want has to be the starting point—something that also comes up in the book I’m reading now about occupied Japan.

Morozov argues that many subjects of repressive regimes want orderly justice, access to education and health care, and so on, as much as more than they want free elections, and if their governments can deliver those things—now aided by the internet in rooting out the most obvious of corruption, as in China where people are encouraged to report local malfeasance to national authorities—then they’ll have sufficient legitimacy to survive challenges. This is especially true given that many people online are at least as nationalistic and xenophobic as their governing regimes: “official government policy looks cosmopolitan in comparison.”

Morozov is particularly biting about how American politicians speak of the internet as bringer of truth abroad but dangerous source of potential misinformation (and porn, and copyright infringement etc.) at home. Obama said “the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes” in Shanghai, but in Virginia he targeted “a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter.” It’s like we think that birtherism couldn’t possibly take hold somewhere else. Thomas Friedman suggests that people will be able to comparison shop for governments, but “[f]or some reason … Americans, with all their unfettered access to the Internet, don’t hail Friedman’s advice, failing to do much government-shopping on their own and see that other governments have far more reasonable approaches to, for example, imprisoning their citizens.”

Morozov is weakest when he condemns the speed of information flow, arguing that it’s impossible to make effective policies “under the influence of blood-cur[d]ling videos of Iranian protesters dying on the pavement.” Sensationalism (and indifference to suffering) have been with us for a while, and he seems to conflate easy access to video with lack of access to somehow-more-real “facts.” It’s certainly true that most Iranians weren’t on Twitter, so anyone making judgments about the situation in Iran during the big protests shouldn’t have just looked on Twitter, but policymakers have generally suffered from ethnocentric interpretations of events elsewhere, and I’m not convinced the internet changed that.

The book has few specific solutions. Morozov wants us to think harder about what we’re doing. He suggests considering restrictions on sales of privacy-violating technology to foreign states, as well as restrictions on what services like Google can do with private information generally. “While many of us in the developed world can maybe survive the demise of privacy as long as toher legal institutions are working well … it might easily have disastrous consequences elsewhere.” We must stop celebrating innovation for its own sake without looking at its political consequences. Solutions may be country-by-country—he suggests that uninhibited social/sexual discourse may be useful in the most repressive societies by pushing the boundaries of what can and can’t be said, whereas in others it may only be distracting. Morozov also points out the fallacies of the libertarian part of cyberlibertarianism: government needs to work well to give us the benefits of freedom, and the “freedom on the cheap” ideology that says the Internet will liberate the world without any help is just a part of the larger mistake about what government should be doing. show less