To Save Everything, Click Here The Folly of Technological Solutionism

Sharp and original mismash of intellectual history, law, political economy, as well as an ok bit of polemical sociology and theory of Design. His targets are the 'solutionists', those technocrat techies who derive from the half of the Enlightenment which became positivism. (It is roughly: the will to perfect things and people, plus theorism, plus economism, plus the sheer power and scope of modern software.) Morozov is, bluntly, afraid for us all because software is eating the world: Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder and the opportunity to err, to sin: all of these are constitutive of human freedom, and any concentrated attempt to root them out will root out that freedom as well... we risk finding ourselves with a politics devoid of everything that makes politics desirable, with humans who have lost their basic capacity for moral reasoning, with lackluster cultural institutions that don't take risks and, most terrifyingly, with a perfectly controlled social environment that would make dissent not just impossible but possibly even unthinkable... But I do not want the freedom to believe harmful falsehoods, nor the freedom to hide my errors behind ambiguity; nor the freedom to throw away resources which others need. And I don't want the freedom to waste my life. Technology is the only untried way of responding to our grave Darwinian inheritance of intolerance, selfishness, and irrationality. But Morozov makes his case well about the specific case of technologised politics.

A powerful and highly necessary reflection on the politics of technology. Morozov ability to synthesise current discourses around technology and more specifically “the internet” is simply brilliant. I was impressed by the depth but also by the range of domains touched throughout the discussion - Openness, Neutrality, Big Data, Quantification, Gamification, Self-augmentation, Algorithmic ruling, Philosophy vs. Psychology, etc. Morozov is an avid observer and thinker, he’s someone interested in understanding in depth the intricacies of the interconnected world. This is no luddite manifesto, this is an appeal to reflection about the world we’re creating. An appeal to take control of the world we live in, instead of being controlled but the so called inevitabilities of the technological progress. I’ll dive in depth on the immense subjects touched in the book in my blog soon. Análise em português: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Sometimes interesting, too long, too aggressive, too sarcastic, not really enjoyable