The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [167]
Upon publication, Weinberg’s essay launched a heated debate between technologists and social engineers. This debate is still raging today, in part because Google, founded by a duo of extremely ambitious engineers on a crusade to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” has put the production of technological fixes on something of an industrial scale. Make the world’s knowledge available to everyone? Take photos of all streets in the world? How about feeding the world’s books into a scanner and dealing with the consequences later? Name a problem that has to deal with information, and Google is already on top of it.
Why the Ultimate Technological Fix Is Online
It’s not all Google’s fault. There is something about the Internet and its do-it-yourself ethos that invites an endless production of quick fixes, bringing to mind the mathematician John von Neumann’s insightful observation that “technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will” (even though on that last point, von Neumann may have been a bit off ). With the Internet, it seems, everything is irresistible, if only because everything is within easy grasp. It’s the Internet, not nuclear power, that is widely seen as the ultimate technological fix to all of humanity’s problems. It won’t solve them, but it could make them less visible or less painful.
As the Internet makes technological fixes cheaper, the temptation to apply them even more aggressively and indiscriminately also grows. And the easier it is to implement them, the harder it is for internal critics to argue that such fixes should not be tried at all. In most organizations, low cost—and especially in times of profound technological change—is usually a strong enough reason to try something, even if it makes little strategic sense at the time. When technology promises so much and demands so little, the urge to find a quick fix is, indeed, irresistible. Policymakers are not immune to such temptations either. When it’s so easy and cheap to start a social networking site for activists in some authoritarian country, a common gut reaction is usually “It should be done.” That cramming personal details of all dissidents on one website and revealing connections among them may outweigh the benefits of providing activists with a cheaper mode of communication only becomes a concern retroactively. In most cases, if it can be done, it will be done. URLs will be bought, sites will be set up, activists will be imprisoned, and damning press releases will be issued. Likewise, given the undeniable mobilization advantages of the mobile phone, one may start singing its praises before realizing that it has also provided the secret police with a unique way to track and even predict where the protests may break out.
The problem with most technological fixes is that they come with costs unknown even to their fiercest advocates. Historian of science Lisa Rosner argues that “technological fixes, because they attack symptoms but don’t root out causes, have unforeseen and deleterious side effects that may be worse than the social problem they were intended to solve.” It’s hard to disagree, even more so in the case of the Internet. When digital activism is presented as the new platform for campaigning and organizing, one begins to wonder whether its side effects—further disengagement between traditional oppositional forces who practice real politics, no matter how risky and boring, and the younger generation, passionate about campaigning on Facebook and Twitter—would outweigh the benefits of cheaper and leaner communications. If the hidden costs of digital