Merry Christmas, thinking, rational people. Evgeny Morozov has written the most satisfying takedown of quack internet moralizing to date.
In an excerpt from his upcoming book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, Morozov identifies what he calls “Internet centrism,” the blindly optimistic creed that the Internet has a logic of decentralization and crowd decision-making, which should be used to remodel real-world infrastructure. He rips what he deems the manifesto, Steven Johnson’s Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age, citing Johnson’s casual assertion that the NEA should be more like Kickstarter, and government be more like Wikipedia; i.e., that experts be dispensed altogether– something we heard often at Occupy, despite all the evidence to the contrary. To this, Morozov responds:
Better systems for aggregating and dispensing knowledge can certainly help to solve many problems, but those are problems of a very peculiar nature. Can Washington’s reluctance to intervene in Syria—to take just an extreme example—be blamed on a deficit of knowledge? Or does it stem, rather, from a deficit of will, or of principle?
And it gets better:
This lack of curiosity about how the world works is the most pernicious feature of Internet-centrism…[Johnson] never asks what it is that the NEA actually does, how it sets its agenda, and what it hopes to achieve.
Is the kind of expertise that the NEA relies on additive? Does the cumulative knowledge of ten mediocre wanna-be art critics on Kickstarter equal that of one art wonk who works at the NEA?