Evgeny Morozov Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In part, slacktivism is what happens when the energy of otherwise dedicated activists is wasted on approaches that are less effective than the alternatives.
-
A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don't understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook.
-
Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn't.
-
To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image.
-
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.
-
Google’s vision is tools that will do things for you.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The Internet can empower groups whose aims are in fact antithetical to democracy.
-
Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.
-
Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.
-
I went to SXSW in 2011. God, that was awful. I mean, I only went because my publisher wanted me to promote the book and the organizers invited me and it seemed silly not to go, especially for a relatively unknown first-time author. This is just not my cup of tea; the fewer such events I do on an annual basis, the happier I feel.
-
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.