technological solutionism Concepts

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly · 7 Jan 2025 · 293pp · 104,461 words

piracy, not downloads, not streaming. There are no one-click solutions, and perhaps what music could benefit from most would be a wholesale rejection of technological solutionism. The problems faced by musicians, like those faced elsewhere in society, aren’t technological problems: they’re problems of power and labor. Luckily, the future

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

by Evgeny Morozov · 15 Nov 2013 · 606pp · 157,120 words

Table of Contents Title Page Dedication Introduction CHAPTER ONE - Solutionism and Its Discontents The Will to Improve (Just About Everything!) Kooks and Cooks Pasteur and Zynga CHAPTER TWO - The Nonsense of “the Internet”—and How to Stop It Against the Internet Grain The Faux Didacticism of “the Internet” If Internet Theorists Were Bouncers Of Epochs and Epochalisms With Models Like This . . . Hype and Consequences Gutenberg in the Kingdom of Geekistan From Bad Book History to Bad Blog History Recycle the Cycle CHAPTER THREE - So Open It Hurts Bad for the Databases, Good for Democracy? Escaping the Double Click From Sunburn to Solar Power When Transparency Hurts The Perils of Information Reductionism Openness and Its Messiahs Who Put “Open” in “Open Government”? CHAPTER FOUR - How to Break Politics by Fixing It Future Perfect—Democracy Isn’t Go to the iTunes of Politics to Download Your Welfare Learning to Love the Imperfections In Truth We Trust? Networks, Leaders, Hierarchies Technoescapists versus Technorationalists Technocrats and Their Limits CHAPTER FIVE - The Perils of Algorithmic Gatekeeping Drowning in the Algorithmic Sea The Meme Industry Will Make You Famous Surviving Big Data “Down with the Gatekeepers!” . . . Say the Gatekeepers The Rise of Uncritical Critics CHAPTER SIX - Less Crime, More Punishment You’ve Been Arrested—by Facebook Why You Should Ride the Metro in Berlin Autotopia in Jeopardy Wither Moral Citizenship? The Perils of Preemption Bouncers Versus Vibes Against Technological Defeatism Of Norms and Noises CHAPTER SEVEN - Galton’s iPhone Seeing Like a Self The Ryanairation of Privacy The Great Unraveling Between Nietzsche and Condorcet From Nutritionism to Educationism The Imperialism of Numbers When Facts Are Made of Water Hunches and Fractured Pelvises CHAPTER EIGHT - The Superhuman Condition Madeleine: There’s an App for That! The Nutritional Aspects of Jerry Springer Phantoms and Backpacks False and Imaginary Cosmopolitanisms Gamify or Die B. F. Skinner Among the Unfinished Animals Monkeys, Sex, and Predictable Duress Don’t Fold It at Home Mad Men, Faded Denims, and Real Phonies CHAPTER NINE - Smart Gadgets, Dumb Humans Victorian Trains and Montana Huts Radios, Caterpillars, and Lamps The Natural Fuse and Its Adversaries Can Content Farms Be Organic? The Perils of Willpower On Frictionless Traps Technologies and Truths Postscript Notes Acknowledgments Index Copyright Page To my parents 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 Silicon Valley is guilty of many sins, but lack of ambition is not one 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 build an infrastructure on top of which to solve some of these problems,” 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 intellectual 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. Technology can make us better—and technology will make us better. Or, as the geeks would say, given enough apps, all of humanity’s bugs are shallow. California, of course, has never suffered from a deficit of optimism or bluster. And yet, the possibilities opened up by latest innovations make even the most pragmatic and down-to-earth venture capitalists reach for their wallets. After all, when else will they get a chance to get rich by saving the world? What else would give them the thrill of working in a humanitarian agency (minus all the bureaucracy and hectic travel, plus a much better compensation package)? How will this amelioration orgy end? Will it actually accomplish anything? One way to find out is to push some of these nascent improvement efforts to their ultimate conclusions. If Silicon Valley had a designated futurist, her bright vision of the near future—say, around 2020 or so—would itself be easy to predict. It would go something like this: Humanity, equipped with powerful self-tracking devices, finally conquers obesity, insomnia, and global warming as everyone eats less, sleeps better, and emits more appropriately. The fallibility of human memory is conquered too, as the very same tracking devices record and store everything we do. Car keys, faces, factoids: we will never forget them again. No need to feel nostalgic, Proust-style, about the petite madeleines you devoured as a child; since that moment is surely stored somewhere in your smartphone—or, more likely, your smart, all-recording glasses—you can stop fantasizing and simply rewind to it directly. In any event, you can count on Siri, Apple’s trusted voice assistant, to tell you the truth you never wanted to face back then: all those madeleines dramatically raise your blood glucose levels and ought to be avoided. Sorry, Marcel! Politics, finally under the constant and far-reaching gaze of the electorate, is freed from all the sleazy corruption, backroom deals, and inefficient horse trading. Parties are disaggregated and replaced by Groupon-like political campaigns, where users come together—once—to weigh in on issues of direct and immediate relevance to their lives, only to disband shortly afterward. Now that every word—nay, sound—ever uttered by politicians is recorded and stored for posterity, hypocrisy has become obsolete as well. Lobbyists of all stripes have gone extinct as the wealth of data about politicians—their schedules, lunch menus, travel expenses—are posted online for everyone to review. As digital media make participation easier, more and more citizens ditch bowling alone—only to take up blogging together. Even those who’ve never bothered to vote in the past are finally provided with the right incentives—naturally, as a part of an online game where they collect points for saving humanity—and so they rush to use their smartphones to “check in” at the voting booth. Thankfully, getting there is no longer a chore; self-driving cars have been invented for the purpose of getting people from place to place. Streets are clean and shiny; keeping them that way is also part of an elaborate online game. Appeals to civic duty and responsibility to fellow citizens have all but disappeared—and why wouldn’t they, when getting people to do things by leveraging their eagerness to earn points, badges, and virtual currencies is so much more effective? Crime is a distant memory, while courts are overstaffed and underworked. Both physical and virtual environments—walls, pavements, doors, log-in screens—have become “smart.” That is, they have integrated the plethora of data generated by the self-tracking devices and social-networking services so that now they can predict and prevent criminal behavior simply by analyzing their users. And as users don’t even have the chance to commit crimes, prisons are no longer needed either. A triumph of humanism, courtesy of Silicon Valley. And then, there’s the flourishing new “marketplace” of “ideas.” Finally, the term “marketplace” no longer feels like a misnomer; cultural institutions have never been more efficient or responsive to the laws of supply and demand. Newspapers no longer publish articles that their readers are not interested in; the proliferation of self-tracking combined with social-networking data guarantees that everyone gets to read a highly customized newspaper (down to the word level!) that yields the highest possible click rate. No story goes unclicked, no headline untweeted; customized, individual articles are generated in the few seconds that pass between the click of a link and the loading of the page in one’s browser. The number of published books has skyrocketed—most of them are self-published—and they are perfectly efficient as well. Many even guarantee alternative endings—and in real time!—based on what the eye-tracking activity of readers suggests about their mood. Hollywood is alive and kicking; now that everyone wears smart glasses, a movie can have an infinite number of alternative endings, depending on viewers’ mood at a given moment as they watch. Professional critics are gone, having been replaced first by “crowds,” then by algorithms, and finally by customized algorithmic reviews—the only way to match films with customized alternative endings. The edgiest cultural publications even employ algorithms to write criticism of songs composed by other algorithms. But not all has changed: just like today, the system still needs imperfect humans to generate the clicks to suck the cash from advertisers. This brief sketch is not an excerpt from the latest Gary Shteyn-gart novel. Nor is it dystopian science fiction. In fact, there is a good chance that at this very moment, someone in Silicon Valley is making a pitch to investors about one of the technologies described above. Some may already have been built. A dystopia it isn’t; many extremely bright people—in Silicon Valley and beyond—find this frictionless future enticing and inevitable, as their memos and business plans would attest. I, for one, find much of this future terrifying, but probably not for the reasons you would expect. All too often, digital heretics like me get bogged down in finding faults with the feasibility of the original utopian schemes. Is perfect efficiency in publishing actually attainable? Can all environments be smart? Will people show up to vote just because they are playing a game? Such skeptical questions over the efficacy of said schemes are important, and I do entertain many of them in this book. But I also think that we, the heretics, also need to take Silicon Valley innovators at their word and have just a bit more faith in their ingenuity and inventiveness. These, after all, are the same people who are planning to scan all the world’s books and mine asteroids. Ten years ago, both ideas would have seemed completely crazy; today, only one of them does. So perhaps we should seriously entertain the possibility that Silicon Valley will have the means to accomplish some of its craziest plans. Perhaps it won’t overthrow the North Korean regime with tweets, but it could still accomplish a lot. This is where the debate ought to shift to a different register: instead of ridiculing the efficacy of their means, we also need to question the adequacy of the innovators’ ends. My previous book, The Net Delusion, shows the surprising resilience of authoritarian regimes, which have discovered their own ways to profit from digital technologies. While I was—and remain—critical of many Western efforts to promote “Internet freedom” in those regimes, most of my criticisms have to do with the means, not the ends, of the “Internet freedom agenda,” presuming that the ends entail a better climate for freedom of expression and more respect for human rights. In this book, I have no such luxury, and I question both the means and the ends of Silicon Valley’s latest quest to “solve problems.” I contend here that Silicon Valley’s promise of eternal amelioration has blunted our ability to do this questioning. Who today is mad enough to challenge the virtues of eliminating hypocrisy from politics? Or of providing more information—the direct result of self-tracking—to facilitate decision making? Or of finding new incentives to get people interested in saving humanity, fighting climate change, or participating in politics? Or of decreasing crime? To question the appropriateness of such interventions, it seems, is to question the Enlightenment itself. And yet I feel that such questioning is necessary. Hence the premise of this book: Silicon Valley’s quest to fit us all into a digital straightjacket by promoting efficiency, transparency, certitude, and perfection—and, by extension, eliminating their evil twins of friction, opacity, ambiguity, and imperfection—will prove to be prohibitively expensive in the long run. For various ideological reasons to be explained later in these pages, this high cost remains hidden from public view and will remain so as long as we, in our mindless pursuit of this silicon Eden, fail to radically question our infatuation with a set of technologies that are often lumped together under the deceptive label of “the Internet.” This book, then, attempts to factor in the true costs of this highly awaited paradise and to explain why they have been so hard to account for. Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder, and the opportunity to err, to sin, to do the wrong thing: all of these are constitutive of human freedom, and any concentrated attempt to root them out will root out that freedom as well. If we don’t find the strength and the courage to escape the silicon mentality that fuels much of the current quest for technological perfection, 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 (if not moribund) cultural institutions that don’t take risks and only care about their financial bottom lines, and, most terrifyingly, with a perfectly controlled social environment that ...

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian · 4 Apr 2023 · 360pp · 107,124 words

Technology (Fall 2012): 65. 3. Romer, “A Theory of History, with an Application.” 4. See Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013). 5. Pauline Lipman, “Obama’s Education Policy: More Markets, More Inequality, New Urban Contestations,” in Urban Policy in the Time of

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

by Scott J. Shapiro · 523pp · 154,042 words

better role model”: Partial Transcript of Imposition, 21. Conclusion: The Death of Solutionism Evgeny Morozov: Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Washington, DC: PublicAffairs, 2013). “Africa? There’s an App”: “Africa? There’s an App for That,” Wired, August 7, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child

by Morgan G. Ames · 19 Nov 2019 · 426pp · 117,775 words

social change appear straightforward instead of as a difficult process fraught with choices and politics. This gives charismatic technologies a spirit of technological determinism (or “technological solutionism”), whereby progress that a technology is supposed to cause is framed as natural and inevitable, thus overriding individual, social, institutional, or other kinds of agency

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a technology’s promises outstrip its actual capabilities and capture the social imagination. Whereas a fixation on technology-driven disruption and a strong sense of technological solutionism both play a role in the story of OLPC, charisma provides a way both to unify the various mechanisms for social influence that OLPC tried

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

by Jamie Susskind · 3 Sep 2018 · 533pp

. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (London: Penguin, 2011), xiii. 29. Ibid. 30. Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here:Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist (London: Penguin, 2014), 5. 31. See generally Andrew J. Beniger, Control Revolution: Technological and Economic

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot

by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy · 14 Apr 2020

-things/home-automation-is-still-mostly-a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem.html. 21. Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013). 22. Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 8. 23. Drew Harwell, “Why Whirlpool

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy

by Linsey McGoey · 14 Apr 2015 · 324pp · 93,606 words

with the Gates Foundation: How Much Difference Is it Making?’, Alliance 16 (2011), 29–45. 11Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (London: Allen Lane, 2013) 12Rich, “‘No Child” Law Whittled Down by White House’. 13Edwards, Small Change, 25. 14Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here, 133. 15Peter

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx · 4 Jul 2022 · 295pp · 81,861 words

argued that the approach of these powerful figures creates a quest for technofixes that do not address the real problems we face. He called this “technological solutionism” and defined it as “an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to

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Your Computer Is on Fire, MIT Press, 2020, p. 87. 33 Ibid., p. 85. 34 Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, PublicAffairs, 2013, p. 6. 35 Ibid., p. 5. 36 Jarrett Walker, “The Dangers of Elite Projection,” Human Transit (blog), July 31, 2017, Humantransit.org. 37

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, 122 TCP/IP protocol, 50 TechGirls Canada, 228–9 tech industry development of, 9–10 growth of, 4, 180–5 speed of technological innovation, 48 technological solutionism, 59 Tesla, 5–6, 55, 63–4, 70, 72, 73, 82–4, 85–6, 116, 137–8, 143, 147, 158–9, 188, 189, 190 Tesla

Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

by Ashley Shew · 18 Sep 2023 · 154pp · 43,956 words

normalize our mere-difference in order to make ourselves palatable enough—“includeable,” to use sociologist Tanya Titchkosky’s term. But in the current climate of technological solutionism, where my university hosts talks on “The End of Disability” and Herr brings his brand (he does want to sell you his ankles) of technological

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, 32–33, 35, 50–51, 59, 60–61 medical model of disability and, 71 technoableism, defined, 7–8, 9, 130 technofuturists and, 114, 118–19 technological solutionism and, 4, 8, 9–10, 32, 51–53, 71–72, 74 See also accessible environments Disability Visibility Project, 114 disability welfare, 34, 38 disabled, etymology

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, 91 TAB (temporarily able-bodied), 23 Tales from the Crip (Tischer), 30 Taylor, Sunaura, 116 technoableism, defined, 7–8, 9, 130 technofuturists, 114, 118–19 technological solutionism, 4, 8, 9–10, 32, 51–53, 71–72, 74 technologized disabled people (cyborgs), 55 technology. See disability and technology techno-optimism, 60 temporarily able