Evgeny Morozov Quotes
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I'm not on Facebook. I have a sort of anonymous account that I check, like, once every six months every time Facebook rolls out a new feature.
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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."
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There is this huge Roma problem in Europe. There are a lot of Romas who are discriminated against in countries like the Czech Republic or Hungary. They are an ethnic minority that in Europe everyone loves to hate.
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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.
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I draw a distinction between freedom of the internet and freedom via the internet. In the first case, it's making sure cyberspace is not over regulated and people can say what they want without fear of repercussions. But that's different from this freedom via the internet notion, which is often touted by all sorts of conservatives and neoconservatives who want young people in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world to use Facebook and Twitter and then go oppose their governments.
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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.
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Google’s vision is tools that will do things for you.
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For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.
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For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.
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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.
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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.
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The Internet can empower groups whose aims are in fact antithetical to democracy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.
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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.
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iPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.
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The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.
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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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Cyberattacks have become a permanent fixture on the international scene because they have become easy and cheap to launch. Basic computer literacy and a modest budget can go a long way toward invading a country's cyberspace.
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The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.
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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.
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Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.