Technology is the question, not the answer
A review of Morozov's decade old, and yet momentous, book
There are countless accounts describing how we are living through a technological revolution where the internet, AI and data will fix politics, end wars, and solve climate change. They are often articulated by entrepreneurs or venture capitalists, who, encouraged by their hard-earned success in launching a new digital payment system or car sharing company, feel ready to move on and tackle some the most intractable problems affecting humanity. They do not seem daunted by the fact that some of these problems are with us since humans started to roam this planet.
Far from being received with some healthy skepticism, these new evangelists have been widely listened to, shaping the public debate over the last decade. It is against this “solutionism” that Evgeny Morozov published “To Solve Everything, Click Here” in 2013. Since Morozov wrote his book, solutionism has occupied even more airtime in the written and, increasingly podcast-driven, oral narratives that frame our understanding of current affairs.
The most astonishing fact about the book is that it was written almost 10 years ago. It must be hard for Morozov to note that some of his battles are not only not being won, but that they seem more uphill than ever. On a positive tone, this only makes the agenda that he outlines at the end of the book even more relevant today.
Here are his main recommendations for a critical inquiry about technology and society that overcomes the shallow misconceptions of solutionism (most of them verbatim):
- Escape from big questions like “the role of Twitter in strengthening/weakening democracy” or “how the internet helps to unseat dictators.” Instead, focus on very specific questions about the opportunities and limitations of particular technologies in specific contexts through deeply rigorous and empirical approaches.
- Be extremely cautious – even skeptical – about any causality claims made with respect to digital technologies. Recognize that these technologies are not only the causes of the worlds we live in but rather its consequences. Trace how these technologies are produced, what voices and ideologies are silenced in their production and dissemination, and how the marketing literature surrounding these technologies taps into the zeitgeist to make them look inevitable.
- Start any account about a technology much earlier than the usual mid-1990s. Once we realize that for the last hundred years or so virtually every generation has felt like it was on the edge of a technological revolution – be it the telegraph age, the radio age, the plastic age, the nuclear age, or the television age – maintaining the myth that our own period is unique and exceptional will hopefully become much harder.
I take these as very valuable guidelines as I explore the potential of data – and associated technologies – to tackle public problems in cities. There is an assumption that is hard to unseat, claiming that we absolutely need these technological fixes, whether they are smart city gadgets to manage traffic flows or the use of AI to better manage cities’ internal operations.
For Morozov, this cannot be taken for granted, at least not about technologies in general. It is not that technologies are neutral, and that the role of policy should be confined to regulation, so we can profit from them while mitigating their negative impacts. Technologies do not happen in a vacuum, disconnected from the political, historical, and social contexts in which they are created. Keeping this top of mind while we consider a technology is essential to fully evaluate its desirability and to imagine its potential trajectories, and even to question whether the technology should exist in the first place.
This approach to understanding technologies requires some additional analytical habits: (i) always question whether the problem we are trying to tackle is a real problem, (ii) do not forget that solutions provided by technologies are often based on a profound misunderstanding, or at the very least a limited understanding, of human nature, (iii) always remember the power dynamics that may be at play in the decisions about why a technology is developed, chosen and how it is shaped, and (iv) think about the, often hidden, agendas of the companies developing and deploying these technologies.
Politics is a favorite solutionists’ straw-man, and a problem that they believe can be solved through algorithmic regulation of human behavior, expanded participation through social media and the increased transparency offered by public datasets. Morozov disagrees “there is so much conflict in politics simply because people who are free to choose will be bound to pursue conflicting agendas. The arbitrariness of politics that Saint-Simon condemns derives from the fact that in truly free societies, there are few restrictions on what freedoms can be pursued. As such, no algorithm or set of laws can ever be designed to resolve the ensuing conflicts and clashes. Saint-Simon had some intriguing solutions to the problems he identified – not as good as “the Internet” but good enough- except that what he thought to be problems were not problems at all…In some situations, politics will be preferable to technology or law will do a better job as it creates more opportunities for public debate on a given issue to emerge.”
The conception of certain inherent limitations, or conditions, of human nature as problems in search of technological solutions is another common feature of technological exhortations. For example, intellectuals like Ethan Zuckerman and entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg have theorized about the potential of social network platforms to improve human communication and root out human misunderstanding, ultimately resolving conflicts and making world peace more attainable. Once again, Morozov meets these forecasts with suspicion “There are no quick fixes to such problems, for their roots lie not in a faulty transmission system but in the diverging goals, values, and interests. Sometimes, those can’t be bridged by dialogue alone; some political action is required. To return to the Peters epigram at the beginning of this chapter, a solutionist does think that better communications will solve the problem of communication; an antisolutionist, in contrast, recognizes that what we believe to be the ‘problem of communication’ may not be a problem at all.”
Fixing communication problems among humans is just one of the fights in technologists’ efforts to improve human condition: “these attempts to fix the human condition - to reduce our biases by quantifying everything, to circumvent the frailties of our memory by recording everything, to rid us of our lowly, provincial interests by getting technology companies to serve us a more nutritious information diet, to get us to do the right thing by turning everything in life into a game – are indicative of Silicon Valley’s unease with imperfection as well as its glorification of the powerful tools at its disposal.”
Morozov summarizes these limitations of solutionists’ misunderstanding about the human condition, freedom and politics, in the following quote:
Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder, and the opportunity to err, to sin, to do the wrong thing: all of these are constitutive of human freedom, and any concentrated attempt to root them out will root out that freedom as well. If we don’t find the strength and the courage to escape the silicon mentality that fuels much of the current quest for technological perfection, we risk finding ourselves with a politics devoid of everything that makes politics desirable, with humans who have lost their basic capacity for moral reasoning, with lackluster (if not moribund) cultural institutions that don’t take risks and only care about their financial bottom lines, and most terrifyingly, with a perfectly controlled social environment that would make dissent not just impossible but possibly even unthinkable.
Morozov’s dismantling of these misconceptions is powerful, but his argumentation about the power dynamics that underly technologies and the narratives surrounding them is much weaker. He constantly points to power as a hidden force behind solutionism, but often fails to provide concrete examples of how it is deployed. His goal is probably to raise awareness about the issue and not to prove it in every single example – each of them may require a whole study – but the book would be stronger if it had more detailed accounts of the relationship between power and technology.
The book, nonetheless, is a formidable effort to illustrate these points by bringing together a vast array of examples, resources and references, both academic and journalistic. Morozov’s ability to reach into different disciplines and moments in history is delightful to a point that it can make the reader feel confused, even uneasy. At times, the book can feel as a race to cover as many examples as possible, with the author jumping from one anecdote, story, or quote to another. The reader is often left without time to take a breath and ground some of the implications of this rapid fire against solutionism and its apostles. One cannot but wonder if this uneasy feeling is the result of a lack of a more profound theory that glues together Morozov’s display of vast erudition.
This can be felt, for example, in the tension when he criticizes the perils of quantification, while at the same time constantly calling for a more empirical understanding of technologies. Empiricism does not equate quantitative evidence, but deliberation and scientific advancement requires some consensus on methods, measures and facts. The alternative is pure relativism. Morozov does try to solve this tension when he argues “The problem of numbers is not that we do not need numbers. We need to improve their use, and constantly renegotiate it, being aware of the political and power dynamics that influence them.” But again, what these political and power dynamics are is not explained, and therefore they start to look like a wildcard concept waved every time Morozov seems to hit a theoretical glass ceiling.
This does not make the reading less interesting. To the contrary, it is full of interesting pearls such as the intellectual links between Geek’s thinking and the Protestant Reformation, the troubling consequences of the “audit society” or the propagation of myths – such as Moore’s Law – into scientific articles, business thinking and government policy.
As Morozov makes clear, technology is not the enemy. It can contribute greatly to improving our societies, for example by expanding spaces for deliberation. The key is to go beyond techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, to assess each technology on its own merits. Going beyond grandiose narratives is essential to unlock thorough conversations and critical thinking about each technology and its implications.
This is not a trivial need. Technologies reflect values, interests, and power dynamics, and when laws and norms are ingrained in technologies, they are harder to question and change. Technological infrastructures will in turn fabricate and mold the spaces for collective and individual action, often determining the realm of the possible, and ultimately shaping human behaviors and values. Morozov illustrates this point with yet another fascinating reference “Chris Otter, a historian specializing in technology and science in Victorian Britain, convincingly argues that Victorian values like punctuality, cleanliness and attentiveness presuppose the existence of reliable watches, running water and eyeglasses and would not have emerged without them.”
Two important implications arise from Morozov’s main thesis. First, the process of technological development needs to be subject to critical inquiry and democratic debate. Second, the irreversibility of technologies poses a risk to imagining and creating different realities, and therefore, the narratives that stress technologies’ inevitability should be challenged. After nearly a decade after it was published, some of Morozov’s objections have become, if anything, more pertinent. Anyone willing to understand how technologies shape, and are shaped, by cities should escape the traps of solutionist thinking.