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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

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Evgeny Morozov
Age: 40
Born: 1984
Born: January 1
Computer Scientist
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More quotes by Evgeny Morozov

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The bigger the network, the harder it is to leave. Many users find it too daunting to start afresh on a new site, so they quietly consent to Facebook's privacy bullying.
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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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Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.
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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For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia's mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.
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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.
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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.
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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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I'm rarely invited to start-up parties, but who cares about their trinkets and apps anyway?
Evgeny Morozov
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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
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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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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
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The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.
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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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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