To Save Everything, Click Here Quotes

“The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“We must not fixate on what this new arsenal of digital technologies allows us to do without first inquiring what is worth doing.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“To reject solutionism is to transcend the narrow-minded rationalistic mindset that recasts every instance of an efficiency deficit [...] as an obstacle that needs to be overcome.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“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.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“If Amazon’s dream of a world without gatekeepers becomes reality, then the company itself will become a powerful gatekeeper.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“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.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!—this quest is likely to have unexpected consequences that could eventually cause more damage than the problems they seek to address.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“amnesia and complete indifference to history (especially the history of technological amnesia) remain the defining features of contemporary Internet debate.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“the spirit of the Internet.” This spirit is a powerful myth concocted by overzealous legal activists, and the sooner we bury it, the better.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“while “the Internet” might disrupt everything, it itself should never be disrupted.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“We are left with possibly better food but without the joy of cooking.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Solutionism’ [interprets] issues as puzzles to which there is a solution, rather than problems to which there may be a response.” —GILLES PAQUET”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Science Finds–Industry Applies–Man Conforms.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Ferguson points out that there will be future crime not because there was past crime but because “the environmental vulnerability that encouraged the first crime is still unaddressed.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Google can pretend that its civic role doesn’t exist as long as it wants; this doesn’t simply make that role go away.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“These may be stupid proposals—even though the paywall, despite all the naysaying from our Internet gurus, seems to be working fine for the New York Times”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“The best explanation of Wikipedia is what its own insiders like to say: Wikipedia works in practice but not in theory. It’s a great line, and in addition to being funny, it also shows that we simply have no adequate theories to understand Wikipedia.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Ambivalence can be counterproductive, but so can certitude: if all your friends really told you what they thought, you might never talk to them again.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“David Hand, a professor of mathematics at Imperial College, notes that "the open data initiative ignores such feedback effects - [that is,] that the very act of publishing the data will influence the quality of future data." Perhaps we want data to be open - but not too open.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Reductionism in itself is not bad and can even be intellectually liberating - as long as we find a way to remind ourselves constantly about what is being reduced and what parts of reality are being shed off in order to zoom in on a particular indicator or model of politics.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“To reduce something to allegedly objective information and then treat that information as if it was an adequate description of the phenomenon at hand, is to obscure the purpose behind the information, a purpose that is not made explicit in the information as such."
To put it in simpler terms, all attempts to measure and describe, say, the openness of a government already start with some basic, even if implicit and invisible, model of what governments are and what they ought to be.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“[...] "information reductionism" - a tendency to view all knowledge through the prism of information that sociologist Nikolas Tsoukas faults for assuming that "a set of indices" can "adequately describe, to represent, the phenomen at hand".”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“In reality, though, control and centralization are not inherently antithetical to innovation; if we have come to believe the opposite, then "the Internet" is partly to blame.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Politwoops, a project of the Sunlight Foundation, collects and highlights tweets deleted by politicians, as if they should never be granted an opportunity to regret what they say. Perhaps the Sunlight Foundation would prefer that politicians say nothing at all. Technologies”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“quasi-religious sentiment about “the Internet”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“Il «soluzionismo» [concepisce] ogni questione come un rompicapo per il quale esiste una soluzione, piuttosto che come un problema per il quale potrebbe esserci una risposta. GILLES PAQUET”
― Evgeny Morozov, Internet non salverà il mondo: Perché non dobbiamo credere a chi pensa che la Rete possa risolvere ogni problema

“TED Conferences – una sorta di Woodstock dell’estenuazione intellettualistica”
― Evgeny Morozov, Internet non salverà il mondo: Perché non dobbiamo credere a chi pensa che la Rete possa risolvere ogni problema

“Celebrating innovation for its own sake is in bad taste. For technology truly to augment reality, its designers and engineers should get a better idea of the complex practices that our reality is composed of.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

“One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism