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There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse 'civic' and 'civil,' and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.

Evgeny Morozov

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Evgeny Morozov
Age: 40
Born: 1984
Born: January 1
Computer Scientist
Journalist
Writer
Done
Absurd
Civic
Thing
Civil
Civics
Believe
Necessarily
Confuse
Good
Tend
Sphere
Always
Build
Spheres
Think
Citizens
Network
Thinking
Public
Association
People
Everything
Assumption

More quotes by Evgeny Morozov

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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
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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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When we can commit a crime, we can also trigger debate. Cases go to courts. Media start covering the cases. But once you build smart environments where, if you meet a certain probabilistic profile, you won't even be allowed to board a bus, let alone commit a crime, we're perpetuating existing laws so they face no challenges or revision.
Evgeny Morozov
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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
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Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.
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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This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.
Evgeny Morozov
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Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.
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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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
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Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions.
Evgeny Morozov
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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
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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
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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
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The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.
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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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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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
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Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn't.
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