April 2013
5 posts
Fiction vs reality
Tim Wu on my book:
Too much assault and battery creates a more serious problem: wrongful appropriation, as Morozov tends to borrow heavily, without attribution, from those he attacks. His critique of Google and other firms engaged in “algorithmic gatekeeping”is basically taken from Lessig’s first book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” in which Lessig argued that technology is necessarily...
Recycle the Cycle - II
Oh I completely forgot that my book had an even more damning section on Tim Wu than the one I posted a few hours ago. So here it is for your amusement:
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Openness and Its Messiahs
Perhaps some of the worst problems of information reductionism could be avoided if only the solutionists’ transparency vocabulary didn’t brim with ambiguous terms. Appeals for “transparency” no longer look...
On Kevin Kelly
As a follow-up to the previous post - on Tim Wu - I’ve also decided to post another long section from the book - this time on Kevin Kelly. (Wu’s own thoughts on Kelly are here; my even longer review of Kelly’s “What Technology Wants” can be found here). See just what an “ambitious work of tech philosophy” - as Wu calls it in his review - Kelly’s...
Recycle the Cycle
Following Tim Wu’s review of my book in The Washington Post, I thought it would be fun to post the long section from the book where I’m critiquing Wu. No wonder he sounds so annoyed: the empire of bullshit that is “the Internet” is slowly beginning to crumble. The section is called “Recycle the Cycle” (a reference to Wu’s “cycle” theory -...
My FT oped: Google Revolution Isn't Worth Our...
Let’s give credit where it is due: Google is not hiding its revolutionary ambitions. As its co-founder Larry Page put it in 2004, eventually its search function “will be included in people’s brains” so that “when you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information”.
Science fiction? The implant is a rhetorical flourish but Mr Page’s utopian...
March 2013
2 posts
Disorder as resistance
I found this in the Letters section of the latest issue of The Times Literary Supplement (dated March 15, 2013). It doesn’t seem to be online:
Binder families
Sir, - In David Winters’s review of The Demon of Writing by Ben Kafka he mentions a clerk who saved the actors of the Comédie-Française during the Terror, by soaking their death warrants in a tub and throwing the balls of pulp out of the...
Need some research assistance
I’m in the early stages of another book project and I need some help with basic research. (See this for a similar call about my previous book, “To Save Everything, Click Here.” That call has worked out fine - the names of my four research assistants did make it into my Acknowledgements section!)
Basically, you’ll be a good fit if
* You can spare 10 hours a week or so...
February 2013
4 posts
"The Second Industrial Revolution is here!": the...
Henry Boettinger, vice-president of Michigan Bell, addressing a group of bankers in 1960:
“It is one of the clichés of our literature that automation is accounting for the phenomenon known as the second Industrial Revolution.”
Spotted in Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of “Information Technology” as a Keyword, 1948-1985
Stewart Brand's definition of "feedback"
Here goes:
FEEDBACK: An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the term would refer to eating your own vomit. ‘Positive feedback’ and ‘negative feedback’ would signify whether you like the vomit or not.
Found in “Cybernetics of Cybernetics“
Another close reading of Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson has flagged a few sentences in my review of his book, claiming that I misrepresent his views. Below you can see what he actually writes in the book - along with the exact language that I used to summarize his positions. I’ll grant it to Johnson: he’s inserted enough hedges into his text to claim that his arguments are not at all what these quotes purport to say. Fine -...
quote of the month
From Warren McCulloch, one of the founding fathers of cybernetics:
“I don’t particularly like people, never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun, invent...
December 2012
1 post
my FT oped on Google and "algorithmic nudging"
The original (paywalled) is here.
Google Should Not Choose Right and Wrong
By Evgeny Morozov
Oscar Wilde once wrote that “on mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends”. The Irishman would have been a fan of Google Now, the web company’s rival to Siri, Apple’s snarky voice-activated virtual personal assistant.
Google Now is less chatty than Siri. It...
October 2012
1 post
Some uplifting prose
Max Horkheimer, always an optimist:
“As their telescopes and microscopes, their tapes and radios become more sensitive, individuals become blinder, more hard of hearing, less responsive, and society more opaque, hopeless, its misdeeds (those just committed and those that threaten) larger, more superhuman than ever before.”
From Dawn and Decline
September 2012
1 post
The Internet explained
Pithy and sharp:
Yes, the internet is democratizing in that sense that the cheap equipment is democratizing. But just because a football is cheap and anyone can kick one around, it doesn’t mean that everybody is Ronaldo.
Franny Armstrong, British documentary filmmaker
SOURCE
August 2012
1 post
Prison reform according to Eric Schmidt
From Harvard Business Review’s “List of Audacious Ideas for Solving the World’s Problems”:
“Technology could also help get nonviolent offenders out of jail faster, so they could begin their reintegration into society. Tamper-proof ankle bracelets that offer GPS tracking and constant monitoring are coming onto the market at prices of $5 to $10. We could ensure that...
June 2012
1 post
My new links feed
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I frequently post links to academic articles, new books, working papers. While I still plan to keep doing that from my main account, from now on most of such links will appear on my new “links” account - @morozov_links.
While I’ll try to be selective with my main account, @morozov_links will have fresh links every day. Apologies in...
April 2012
3 posts
The Nicholas Carr of 1913: "The telephone changes...
Spotted on p.65 of “Crowds; a moving-picture of democracy“(1913) by Gerald Stanley Lee:
“We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler and wider motives.”
The author seems...
My oped in today's Financial Times
This piece runs in today’s FT:
Beware the unholy alliance of state and internet
By Evgeny Morozov
Surveillance means safety. This is the argument wherever and whenever governments seek new powers to monitor their citizens. Proposed legislation in the UK to enable police and intelligence services to access emails, Skype calls and Facebook messages is another such example. It is also...
My piece on the history of facial recognition...
The essay below runs in the April 5 issue of the London Review of Books. I post it here for educational purposes only!
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In Your Face
Evgeny Morozov
Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance by Kelly Gates
NYU Press, 261 pp, £15.99, March 2011, ISBN 978 0 8147 3210 6
Until last summer, hi-tech riots – broadcast on YouTube and...
March 2012
4 posts
How to sound like an Internet pundit: 1974 edition
From Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1974 collection of essays “The Consciousness Industry; On Literature, Politics and the Media”
The open secret of the new electronic media, the decisive political factor, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come is their mobilizing power. When I say mobilize, I mean mobilize, make men more mobile than they are. As...
Here comes sloppiness
Clay Shirky is not on the list of my favorite writers. Why? I find many of his arguments to be sloppy, populist and, occasionally, unfair to the people he’s criticizing (see my review of Cognitive Surplus).
I’ve been rereading Cognitive Surplus and found a very good example that encapsulates it all. At one point in the book, Shirky criticizes the elitism of restaurant critics - who,...
How to dedicate a book
Spotted in the acknowledgements section of Mary Poovey’s “A History of the Modern Fact”:
Finally, readers who do not know me may wonder why I have dedicated such a challenging book to a dog. My answer is simple: even though she did not live to see its publication, Sufi presided over all the stages of this book’s research, writing, and revision. Without her imperious...
How to sound like an Internet pundit: 1978 edition
The quote below is from Daniel Boorstin’s The Republic of Technology (originally published in 1978; part of this quote appears in my book, The Net Delusion).
It’s hard not to notice just how little the populist techno-babble changes, even as the underlying technologies change. Just try replacing “television” with “the Internet” and “Vietnam War”...
February 2012
4 posts
Is Norway's pension fund investing in surveillance...
On February 10th, Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian newspaper, published a long investigation into Norway’s ties with companies that produce surveillance and censorship technology that is used in authoritarian states. Their article is in Norwegian (someone should translate it!) and can be viewed on Scribd.
What follows is a quick summary in English that was sent to me by the author of the...
Why did Steve Jobs park in the handicap spot?
I’ve always wanted to know why Steve Jobs parked in handicap spots. Walter Isaacson, alas, doesn’t really investigate this in his biography.
That’s what I’ve just found on page 47 of The Macintosh Reader. It’s in an essay by David Bunnell, Macworld publisher, recounting his visit to Apple’s headquarters in the early 1980s:
“We could tell that Steve was...
Love Research and Got Some Free Time?
UPDATE: I’m no longer soliciting applications
As some of you may know, I’m working on my second book. At this point, I know enough about the overall structure and flow of the argument that I can start delegating some basic research tasks to others.
Thus, I’m looking for 2-3 research assistants who can commit to 10-15 hours of work every week and who can stay on this project...
[APPLICATION PERIOD OVER NOW] Love Research and...
As some of you may know, I’m working on my second book. At this point, I know enough about the overall structure and flow of the argument that I can start delegating some basic research tasks to others.
Thus, I’m looking for 2-3 research assistants who can commit to 10-15 hours of work every week and who can stay on this project from mid-February to mid-June (I expect the workload to...
January 2012
3 posts
more on conspiracies and anti-vaccination
Now I’m beginning to grasp what it must be like to be Cass Sunstein (Sunstein, having proposed the idea of “cognitive infiltration” a few years back, got an entire book from conspiracy theorists in response).
I’m talking, of course, about my most recent column that proposed a solution that I thought was quite innocent: to have search engines add a line on top of some controversial...
My review of The Digital Origins of Dictatorships...
Perspectives on Politics (2011), 9 : pp 897-900 (original)
Evgeny Morozov, Stanford University
The Digital Origins of Dictatorships and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam. By Philip Howard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 304p. $17.20.
Philip Howard’s important book offers a timely and thorough treatment of a subject that has been catapulted into the...
Steve Jobs's interview with Red Herring, 1996
I couldn’t find this interview anywhere on the Web and Red Herring’s archives are, well, not helpful either…
WHAT’S NEXT? —- While other CEOs are talking about ideas, Steve Jobs, CEO of NeXT Computer, says he’s talking about reality.
1 January 1996
In 1976, at the age of 20, Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer, where he not only built the Apple II, but...
December 2011
0 posts
Benjamin on the future of the book
Couldn’t be more timely:
…already today, as the contemporary mode of knowledge-production demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card-filing systems. For everything essential is found in the note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his own note file.
Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, 1928
November 2011
2 posts
this is how you start a takedown!
The first paragraph of Matt Cartmill’s review of Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions book. It appeared in the International Journal of Primatology (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1991)
This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically...
October 2011
1 post
Socratic dialogue on Jarvis, public parts, the...
The Internet: Let’s jump straight to the very heart of the matter: why do you hate Jeff Jarvis?
The Critic: I certainly don’t hate him! But I do have rather complex feelings about Jeff. Shouldn’t we all? I’ve really tried not to pay any attention to him for a couple of years — he couldn’t last much longer, I naively said to myself — but soon I’ve...
