Evgeny Morozov Quotes
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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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Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.
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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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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.
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Much of the real computer talent today is concentrated in the private sector.
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For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.
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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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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.
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I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Faster roads are not always safer roads - and virtually all societies, democratic or authoritarian, prefer safety over speed, even if many of their citizens enjoy fast driving.
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We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.
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The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.
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A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties.
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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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My hunch is that people often affiliate with causes online for selfish and narcissistic purposes. Sometimes, it may be as simple as trying to impress their online friends, and once you have fashioned that identity, there is very little reason to actually do anything else.
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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.
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Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.
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I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.