To Save Everything, Click Here
The Folly of Technological Solutionism
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
In the very near future, "smart" technologies and "big data" will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such "solutionism" affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vices in disguise? What if some friction in communication is productive and some hypocrisy in politics necessary? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything -- from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity -- by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior we may also change the very nature of that behavior. Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement -- but only if we keep solutionism in check and learn to appreciate the imperfections of liberal democracy. Some of those imperfections are not accidental but by design.
Arguing that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the moral consequences of digital technologies, To Save Everything, Click Here warns against a world of seamless efficiency, where everyone is forced to wear Silicon Valley's digital straitjacket.
Customer Reviews
Futurism’s Black Swan
Evgeny Moroz provides a refreshingly original take on the future. Instead of the rose-colored view of Silicon Valley as the pinnacle of transparency and efficiency, he examines the flaws of what he calls “solutionism”: opaqueness and duplicity under the guise of a future Eden. Moroz explores the religion of technology, identifying similarities with previous dogmas, and forecasting its downstream consequences if uncritically followed.
Before enrolling in Harvard’s History of Science Doctoral Program, Moroz served as a visiting scholar at Stanford and Georgetown. Not only a man of science, his writing reveals him as a man of letters. His rhythmic sentences and Swiftian wit set him apart from the rest of the futurists; in Click’s introduction, he calls TED Conferences the Woodstock of the Intellectual Effete.
Moroz believes Silicon Valley’s quest for efficiency and perfection is doomed to fail; the world is too uncertain and imperfect to be mete and ruled by line and, in an ironic twist, argues maximum efficiency requires accepting some inefficiencies.