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A review by kapsar
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov
5.0
If you believe that 'the Internet' is the end all be all, then you'll probably hate this book. If you think that there's only black and white, you'll probably not like this book. Morozov paints a very complex pictures of how society, philosophy, and technology interact. His two main arguments is that "solutionism" and "Internet Centrism" are damaging, opaque, and loaded with unintended consequences.
He specifically calls out authors like Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Kelly as being specifically bad in this arena. Personally, I found their optimism around technology and "the internet" extremely off-putting, so it was refreshing to find someone that agreed with my assessment. Furthermore, I believe that this book highlights dangerous and risks for our culture that we aren't having conversations about. Things are being decided that have major implications for platform users in terms of applications and true internet architecture that are ill defined and have far reaching impact.
Morozov points out repeatedly that much of the philosophical underpinnings to internet centrism isn't new and can be traced back to the 1800's and the development of technologies like the Telegraph. Morozov believes in open debate about these topics and for clear airing of biases in all of our technologies. I'm not sure how realistic all of that is because these are companies that make money off their algorithms, but at least a conversation about these is vital.
I gave this book 5 stars not because it was particularly accessible - it's not there's a lot of philosophy that I'm not very keen on, or because it was the best written book ever. I gave it this many stars because I feel the book is an important contrarian voice on the topic of the "internet" that desperately needs to be heard. We need more robust debates about technology, we need to bring out the complexity of life and stop behaving as if life is simple and can be easily controlled and managed.
He specifically calls out authors like Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Kelly as being specifically bad in this arena. Personally, I found their optimism around technology and "the internet" extremely off-putting, so it was refreshing to find someone that agreed with my assessment. Furthermore, I believe that this book highlights dangerous and risks for our culture that we aren't having conversations about. Things are being decided that have major implications for platform users in terms of applications and true internet architecture that are ill defined and have far reaching impact.
Morozov points out repeatedly that much of the philosophical underpinnings to internet centrism isn't new and can be traced back to the 1800's and the development of technologies like the Telegraph. Morozov believes in open debate about these topics and for clear airing of biases in all of our technologies. I'm not sure how realistic all of that is because these are companies that make money off their algorithms, but at least a conversation about these is vital.
I gave this book 5 stars not because it was particularly accessible - it's not there's a lot of philosophy that I'm not very keen on, or because it was the best written book ever. I gave it this many stars because I feel the book is an important contrarian voice on the topic of the "internet" that desperately needs to be heard. We need more robust debates about technology, we need to bring out the complexity of life and stop behaving as if life is simple and can be easily controlled and managed.