The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [172]
Furthermore, it’s highly doubtful that wicked problems can ever be resolved on a global scale; some local accomplishments—preferably not only of the rhetorical variety—is all a policymaker can hope for. To build on the famous distinction drawn by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, policymakers should not, as a general rule, preoccupy themselves with utopian social engineering—ambitious, ambiguous, and often highly abstract attempts to remake the world according to some grand plan—but rather settle for piecemeal social engineering instead. This approach might be less ambitious but often more effective; by operating on a smaller scale, policymakers can still stay aware of the complexity of the real world and can better anticipate and mitigate the unintended consequences.
Prophecies Versus Profits
Technological fetishism and a constant demand for technological fixes inevitably breed demand for technological expertise. Technological experts, as clever as they may be on matters concerning technology, are rarely familiar with the complex social and political context in which the solutions they propose are to be implemented.
Nevertheless, whenever nontechnological problems are viewed through the lens of technology, it’s technological experts who get the last word. They design solutions that are often more complex than the problems they were trying to solve, while their effectiveness is often impossible to evaluate, as multiple solutions are being tried at once and their individual contributions are often hard to verify. Even the experts themselves have no full control over those technologies, for they trigger effects that could not have been anticipated. Still, this doesn’t prevent the inventors from claiming their technologies behave according to a plan. It is hard to disagree with John Searle, an American philosopher at the University of California at Berkeley, when he writes that “the two worst things that experts can do when explaining ... technology to the general public are first to give the readers the impression that they understand something they do not understand, and second to give the impression that a theory has been established as true when it has not.”
Chances are that the technological visionaries we count on to guide us into a brighter digital future may excel at solving the wrong kind of problems. Their proposed solutions are technological by definition, for it’s only by touting the benefits of technology that these visionaries have become publicly essential (or as the writer Chuck Klosterman poignantly remarked, “the degree to which anyone values the Internet is proportional to how valuable the Internet makes that person”). Since the only hammer such visionaries have is the Internet, it’s not surprising that every possible social and political problem is presented as an online nail.
Thus, most digital visionaries see the Web as a Swiss army knife ready for any job at hand. They rarely alert us to the information black holes created by the Internet, from the sprawling surveillance apparatus facilitated by the public nature of social networking to the persistence of myth making and propaganda, which is much easier to produce and distribute in a world where every fringe movement blogs, tweets, and Facebooks. The very existence of such black holes suggests that we may not always be able to shape the effects of the Internet as we would like.
The political philosopher Langdon Winner was right when he observed in 1986 that “the sheer dynamism of technical and economic activity in the computer industry evidently leaves its members little time to ponder the historical significance of their own activity.” Winner could not foresee that the situation would only get worse in the era of the Internet, now that the perpetual revolution it has unleashed has shortened the time and space left for analytical thinking. Nevertheless, Winner’s conclusion—that “don’t ask; don’t tell” is “the unspoken motto for today’s technological