A review by ethicsofseeing
The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World by Evgeny Morozov
4.0
The Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo said “Internet is God’s gift to the Chinese people.” But Evgeny Morozov isn’t easily cajoled by that statement. He draws as far as Huxley and Orwell’s views towards authoritarian governments in their works Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) to prove that evangalists’s discourse on the Internet is wrong. He’s critical towards the hypocritical US Government’s Internet policies, the profit-sucker Silicon Valley companies, and the generation of couch potatoes who think they could change the world with a twist of fingers on their iPads.
People with oppressed freedom tend to utilize Internet for trivial things and cheap entertainment consumptions. Give them porno, games, and even pirated music and films, then they would shut up. In The Net Delusion, Morozov concludes that technological determinism is dangerous, but thinking that technology is neutral is equally irresponsible. He points out that the days when we blindly praise the Internet and new technologies are gone. Now it’s time to think realistic – that is by being cyber-realists, with emphasis toward political awareness and careful use of technologies.
People with oppressed freedom tend to utilize Internet for trivial things and cheap entertainment consumptions. Give them porno, games, and even pirated music and films, then they would shut up. In The Net Delusion, Morozov concludes that technological determinism is dangerous, but thinking that technology is neutral is equally irresponsible. He points out that the days when we blindly praise the Internet and new technologies are gone. Now it’s time to think realistic – that is by being cyber-realists, with emphasis toward political awareness and careful use of technologies.