Evgeny Morozov Quotes & Sayings

Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses. — Evgeny Morozov

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

I have no problem with technological solutions to social problems. The key question for me is, 'Who gets to implement them?' and, 'What kinds of politics of reform do technological solutions smuggle through the back door?' — Evgeny Morozov

You know, anyone who wears glasses, in one sense or another, is a cyborg. — Evgeny Morozov

Steve Jobs was notoriously blunt about products he found wanting, but his attack on Flash - Adobe's popular technology for playing multimedia content inside a browser - was particularly vicious. Claiming it was buggy and insecure, Jobs banned it from the iPad. — Evgeny Morozov

If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business. — Evgeny Morozov

When we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, 'Sex and the City,' or maybe funny videos of cats. — Evgeny Morozov

You actually see liberals checking 'Fox News,' if only to know what the conservatives are thinking. And you're seeing conservatives who venture into liberal sources, just to know what 'The New York Times' is thinking. — Evgeny Morozov

I'm not on Facebook. I have a sort of anonymous account that I check, like, once every six months every time Facebook rolls out a new feature. — Evgeny Morozov

Surveillance cameras might reduce crime - even though the evidence here is mixed - but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved. — Evgeny Morozov

Amnesia and complete indifference to history (especially the history of technological amnesia) remain the defining features of contemporary Internet debate. — Evgeny Morozov

North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others. — Evgeny Morozov

This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning. — Evgeny Morozov

I spent two years in Palo Alto - what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don't care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups - and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA - which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier. — Evgeny Morozov

In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. KGB ... used to torture in order to get this data. — Evgeny Morozov

We can now with Google Glasses record everything around us, and we can make sure that nothing is ever forgotten because everything is stored somewhere in Google servers or somewhere else. — Evgeny Morozov

Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable. — Evgeny Morozov

Mobile phones are one of the most insecure devices that were ever available, so they're very easy to trace; they're very easy to tap. — Evgeny Morozov

A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties. — Evgeny Morozov

Information wants to eat brie. — Evgeny Morozov

To understand the limits and opportunities of algorithms in the context of artistic creation, we need to understand that the latter usually consists of three elements: discovery, production, and recommendation. — Evgeny Morozov

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire U.S. government is forced to go through a full-body scanner. — Evgeny Morozov

For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness. — Evgeny Morozov

Apple has an opening to say, 'The tools we are selling to you will enable you to do things rather than do things for you.' Google's vision is tools that will do things for you. — Evgeny Morozov

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va. — Evgeny Morozov

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia. — Evgeny Morozov

If the only hammer you are given is the Internet, it's not surprising that every possible social and political problem is presented as an online nail. — Evgeny Morozov

The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites. — Evgeny Morozov

Dictators aren't stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook. — Evgeny Morozov

As befits Silicon Valley, 'big data' is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans - and credit histories - to millions of people who currently lack access to them. — Evgeny Morozov

Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka's 'The Trial,' awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed. — Evgeny Morozov

Would you like all of your Facebook friends to sift through your trash? A group of designers from Britain and Germany think that you might. Meet BinCam: a 'smart' trash bin that aims to revolutionize the recycling process. — Evgeny Morozov

If my idea was just to maintain a certain lifestyle, there would be no need to get a Ph.D. But I do care very deeply about the idea side as well. — Evgeny Morozov

The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom. — Evgeny Morozov

We need to start seeing privacy as a commons - as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer. — Evgeny Morozov

Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time - so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it? — Evgeny Morozov

In short, Google prefers a world where we consistently go to three restaurants to a world where our choices are impossible to predict. — Evgeny Morozov

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages. — Evgeny Morozov

When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy. — Evgeny Morozov

As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing. — Evgeny Morozov

The great temptation of Big Data is that we can stop worrying about comprehension and focus on preventive action instead. Instead of wasting precious public resources on understanding the 'why' - i.e., exploring the reasons as to why terrorists become terrorists - one can focus on predicting the 'when' so that a timely intervention could be made. — Evgeny Morozov

As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable. — Evgeny Morozov

Cloud computing is a great euphemism for centralization of computer services under one server. — Evgeny Morozov

Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats. — Evgeny Morozov

I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes. — Evgeny Morozov

The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda. — Evgeny Morozov

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools. — Evgeny Morozov

Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of 'open government'; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats. — Evgeny Morozov

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own. — Evgeny Morozov

Sleephackers go to bed with sensors on their wrists and foreheads and maintain detailed electronic sleep diaries, which they often share online. To shift between sleep phases, sleephackers experiment with various diets, room and body temperatures, and kinds of pre-sleep physical exercise. — Evgeny Morozov

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley. — Evgeny Morozov

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

230Our Internet debates ... tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby "openness" is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - "openness" in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite ... is always bad. — Evgeny Morozov

The most effective system of Internet control is not the one that has the most sophisticated and draconian system of censorship, but the one that has no need for censorship whatsoever. — Evgeny Morozov

Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly. — Evgeny Morozov

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

IPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy. — Evgeny Morozov

Russian young people spend countless hours online downloading videos and having a very nice digital entertainment lifestyle, which does not necessarily turn them into the next Che Guevara. — Evgeny Morozov

Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology. — Evgeny Morozov

If you use your smart toothbrush, the data can be immediately sent to your dentist and your insurance company, but it also allows someone from the NSA to know what was in your mouth three weeks ago. — Evgeny Morozov

If Amazon's dream of a world without gatekeepers becomes reality, then the company itself will become a powerful gatekeeper. — Evgeny Morozov

When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen - that's a direct quote - it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents. — Evgeny Morozov

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use. — Evgeny Morozov

The unthinking glorification of digital activism makes its practitioners confuse priorities with capabilities. Getting people onto the streets, which may indeed become easier with modern communication tools, is usually the last stage of a protest movement, in both democracies and autocracies. One cannot start with protests and think of political demands and further steps later on. There are real dangers to substituting startegic and long-term action with spontaneous street marches. — Evgeny Morozov

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice. — Evgeny Morozov

I'm active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle. — Evgeny Morozov

I don't think love for technology itself breeds change. — Evgeny Morozov

However revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn't altered the basic law of human communication: Being nice to your interlocutors is a good way to start any negotiations, particularly, when being hostile is an open invitation for a cyber-fight. — Evgeny Morozov

As leakers take great risks in releasing information, assuring them that they are not sacrificing themselves in vain and that their leaks would have public consequences would most likely encourage more people to leak. — Evgeny Morozov

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

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to. — Evgeny Morozov

Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it's because youths don't have jobs. Or you might say that's because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks. — Evgeny Morozov

Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn't. — Evgeny Morozov

In addition to their 'do no evil' motto, Googlers have always been guided by another, much less explicit philosophy: 'computational arrogance.' — Evgeny Morozov

It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank. — Evgeny Morozov

The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters. — Evgeny Morozov

The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value. — Evgeny Morozov

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information. — Evgeny Morozov

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims. — Evgeny Morozov

[People] somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography. — Evgeny Morozov

To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image. — Evgeny Morozov

I want to prevent us reifying 'the Internet' as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American Constitution as it was written. — Evgeny Morozov

To me, the success of the cyberactivists in Tunisia is actually very interesting, because many of them explicitly rejected any support from Washington. — Evgeny Morozov

My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I'm not sure that we have grappled with any of them. — Evgeny Morozov

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. — Evgeny Morozov

In part, slacktivism is what happens when the energy of otherwise dedicated activists is wasted on approaches that are less effective than the alternatives. — Evgeny Morozov

In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks. — Evgeny Morozov

Look at something like cooking. Now, you would hear a lot about smart kitchens and augmented kitchens. And what do those smart kitchens actually do? They police what's happening inside the kitchen. They have cameras that distinguish ingredients one from each other and that tell you that shouldn't mix this ingredient with another ingredient. — Evgeny Morozov

Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google. — Evgeny Morozov

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. — Evgeny Morozov

In reality, quitting Facebook is much more problematic than the company's executives suggest, if only because users cannot extract all the intangible social capital they have generated on the site and export it elsewhere. — Evgeny Morozov

Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online. — Evgeny Morozov

You know, it's not a given that there is an 'online' and 'offline' world out there. When you use the telephone, you don't say that I'm entering some 'telephono-sphere.' You don't say that, and there is no obvious need to say that when you are using a modem. — Evgeny Morozov

If we don't like rent control, we ought to oppose it on political and social grounds - and not just by arguing that, thanks to smartphones and social networks, we can create new, more efficient markets for matching short-term renters with tenants. — Evgeny Morozov

There is this group of people who love innovation. Those people want to innovate, and they think the Internet is a wonderful tool for innovation, which is true. But you also have to remember that much of that innovation is constrained within the realities of the foreign policy. — Evgeny Morozov

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

There is no doubt that the Internet brims with spamming, scamming and identity fraud. Having someone wipe out your hard drive or bank account has never been easier, and the tools for committing electronic mischief on your enemies are cheap and widely accessible. — Evgeny Morozov

Much of the real computer talent today is concentrated in the private sector. — Evgeny Morozov

The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington. — Evgeny Morozov

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy. — Evgeny Morozov