The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [170]
Many calls to apply technological fixes to complex social problems smack of the promotion of technology for technology’s own sake—a technological fetishism of an extreme variety—which policymakers should resist. Otherwise, they run the risk of prescribing their favorite medicine based only on a few common symptoms, without even bothering to offer a diagnosis. But as it is irresponsible to prescribe cough medicine for someone who has cancer, so it is to apply more technology to social and political problems that are not technological in nature.
Taming the Wicked Authoritarianism
The growing supply of technological and even social fixes presupposes that the problem of authoritarianism can be fixed. But what if it is simply an unsolvable problem to begin with? To ask this question is not to suggest that there will always be evil and dictators in the world; rather, it is to question whether, from a policy-planning perspective, one can ever find the right mix of policies and incentives that could be described as a “solution” and could then be applied in completely different environments.
In 1972, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, two influential design theorists at the University of California at Berkeley, published an essay with the unpromising title of “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” The essay, which quickly became a seminal text in the theory of planning, argued that, with the passing of the industrial era, the modern planner’s traditional focus on efficiency—performing specific tasks with low inputs of resources—has been replaced by a focus on outputs, entrapping the planner in an almost never-ending ethical investigation of whether the produced outputs were socially desirable. But the growing complexity of modern societies made such investigations difficult to conduct. As planners began to “see social processes as the links tying open systems into large and interconnected networks of systems, such that outputs from one become inputs to others,” they were no longer certain of “where and how [to] intervene even if [they] do happen to know what aims [they] seek.” In a sense, the sheer complexity of the modern world has led to planning paralysis, as the very solutions to older problems inevitably create problems of their own. This was a depressing thought.
Nevertheless, Rittel and Webber proposed that instead of glossing over the growing inefficiency of both technological and social fixes, planners—and policymakers more generally—should confront this gloomy reality and acknowledge that no amount of careful planning would resolve many of the problems they were seeking to tackle. To better understand the odds of success, they proposed to distinguish between “wicked” and “tame” problems. Tame or benign problems can be precisely defined, and one can easily tell when such problems have been solved. The solutions may be expensive but are not impossible and, given the right mix of resources, can usually be found. Designing a car that burns less fuel and attempting to accomplish checkmate in five moves in chess are good examples of typical tame problems.
Wicked problems, on the other hand, are more intellectually challenging. They are hard to define—in fact, they cannot be defined until a solution has been found. But they also have no stopping rule, so it’s hard to know when that has happened. Furthermore, every wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another, “higher-level” problem and thus should