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'Solutionism' for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection - by means of technology - without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.

Evgeny Morozov

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Evgeny Morozov
Age: 40
Born: 1984
Born: January 1
Computer Scientist
Journalist
Writer
Without
Essentials
Unthinking
Mean
Perfection
Grips
Coming
Feature
Technology
Imperfection
Democracy
Liberal
Fact
Features
Means
Pursuit
Facts
Essential

More quotes by Evgeny Morozov

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Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.
Evgeny Morozov
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Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.
Evgeny Morozov
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Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it's probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don't see any big political consequences out of that.
Evgeny Morozov
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I'm active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle.
Evgeny Morozov
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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
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The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively.
Evgeny Morozov
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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
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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
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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
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For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.
Evgeny Morozov
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[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
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Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.
Evgeny Morozov
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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
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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
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This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.
Evgeny Morozov
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The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.
Evgeny Morozov
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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
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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
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As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.
Evgeny Morozov
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The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.
Evgeny Morozov