To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

"Evgeny Morozov is an important critical, at times cynical, figure. He identifies the problems of naive and delusional social engineering that come out of tech cultures and maybe even science cultures. He asks us to remember, much like Rushkoff, who we are as a society and what questions we should delegate to technologies which take complex human issues and problems and model them into quantifiable, comparable and deterministic queries and questions. This book is important because even though it’s several years old, it identifies a key intellectual flaw that exists in tech bubbles, which is the idea that everything can be solved by a few dudes in Silicon Valley, because they’re just going to build better tech. That attitude in Silicon Valley reflects a deep cynicism of the public sphere and about how democracy really functions, which is messy. And it really ignores, reduces and devalues the voices of people who are outside the tech world. It’s really a trailblazing book in pointing out the hubris or at least ignorance and very flawed way of designing, dominating, commanding and engineering our world that comes out of ideological circles in tech elite bubbles. I really appreciate his analysis of that issue. I wouldn’t say that in my day-to-day job now I have much interaction, but I am from Silicon Valley. I went to Stanford in the late 90s and people who lived in my dorms founded Paypal with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. I have undergrad and graduate degrees in engineering, the latter from the MIT Media Lab where I was side-by-side with a number of major figures in tech today. But for the last 20 years or so, I’ve observed something very insular in that world, something very culturally and globally ignorant. It falsely sees itself as agnostic when it’s deeply influential on people’s lives. “Right now, in the United States, 48 out of 50 state attorney generals are investigating Facebook for antitrust violations” I’m often speaking at big conferences with vice presidents of Facebook on the panel with me. I am pretty conciliatory and I try to be charming and nice to everybody. I don’t single people out as individuals; I try to find spaces where we can change and learn from one another. As you can probably tell, I’m extremely personally passionate about this. I didn’t write this book for my career. I wrote it because I believe these things. What I’m most passionate about is the objectification and the erasure of the brilliance and beauty of billions of people across the world and especially the Global South. That’s a big theme that concerns me a lot. They are being completely ignored and seen merely as passive users of our stuff, or even that our technology will liberate them. It’s patronizing at best and colonial at worst. So I’ve always been a political activist. I’ve also travelled all over the world, long before I started writing about this in relation to tech. I’ve been in probably about 80 countries, so I’ve seen these absurdities first hand. The vast majority of Google and Facebook users are not in Europe, they’re not in North America. They’re across the continents of the Global South. They’re in Asia, Africa and South America. So it’s quite telling that these companies are monetizing the lives and data of billions of people and trying to lock them into keeping their attention without any responsibility or collaboration on any significant level. That’s why some people refer to this as ‘digital colonialism.’ I try not to use that language because it’s not quite so simple as mapping, and it doesn’t give us a pathway out. Nonetheless, it’s a common term. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism , uses some of this kind of language as well. It’s an appropriate term. It’s an older term in a way, she’s been writing about this for 20 years or so."