In the past decade, it seems as though everything in the
United States has been deemed “broken” at some point in time. We’ve all heard
the cries of “Education is broken”, “Welfare is broken”, or “Foreign policy is
broken”. One could easily choose their policy reform area of choice and say
“_____ is broken” and they would find supporters of their cause. For the
purposes of this review, I define something being “broken” as something that is
not functioning as we feel it out to and not serving its ideal purpose. To say
that things in humanity don’t always work ideally is a correct statement.
However, classifying something as “broken” implies that something must be done
to fix it, but the “fix” society uses to alleviate our inefficiencies may have
greater consequences than the problem itself.
This potentially dangerous and short-sighted tendency to try
to fix all of humanity’s problems, specifically with the latest technology, is
what Evgeny Morozov describes and warns against in his 2013 book To Save
Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. In the
book, Morozov identifies, describes, and argues against two key tendencies in
the technological world that, according to him, are more dangerous than
beneficial: “solutionism”, the belief that technology can solve all of
humanity’s complex problems, and “Internet-centrism”, the belief in the
Internet as the ultimate technology, a fixed entity with its own value system
with which humans dare not mess with. Moreover, Morozov questions whether many
of today’s “problems” that society believes require fixing are truly problems
that require fixing in the first place. In the interests of demonstrating how
rampant these two beliefs are within world society today, Morozov dedicates the
majority of To Save Everything, Click Here to, chapter-by-chapter
describing a different area into which this type of thinking has embedded
itself. The book is not aimed at an all –out exposition of why solutionist
attitudes are bad, but rather “to hint at how and why some of these attitudes,
dispositions, and urges can and should be resisted, circumvented and
unlearned.” In To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov begins the
important, but rather unpopular, conversation of why attaining technological
perfection through “solutionism”, driven by “Internet-centrism”, “without
attending to the intricacies of the human condition and accounting for the
complex world of practices and traditions, might not be worth the price.”
Over the course of 352 pages, Morozov demonstrates “solutionism”
in action in various parts of society, many of which were a part of our
discussion in LIS 201. Three of his most compelling cases of technological
“solutionism” in society are tied to our readings and discussions of
“data-veillance” in surveillance, the use of algorithms, and the principles of
scientific management in “Rise of the Reengineers.” Using these ideas and more,
Morozov makes a compelling and justified case about the dangers of
“solutionist” thinking. However, one of the major criticisms of Morozov’s
writing, and one that this book is not immune to, is that Morozov spends too
much time “destroying” his ideological opponents and proving them wrong than he
does proposing alternative courses of action. One thing that stuck out to me
right away was that Morozov seemed to have some serious issues with a lot of
other technological writers and theorists, and at times, he came across as
someone who knew he was right, and couldn’t tolerate anyone who didn’t see
that. Although that kind of language and
attacks on other theorists distracted me a little bit, I believe that Morozov
is very successful in defending his thesis, as the evidence for his case is
strong and his arguments are witty, compelling, and insightful. I think it will
be beneficial to examine his case against “solutionism” and “Internet-centrism”
under the lens of three areas that Morozov also chose to highlight:
surveillance, algorithms, and scientific management.
One of the readings in our LIS 201 class that I found most
compelling was “Surveillance, Power, and Everyday Life” by David Lyon. The
title in itself is clear in establishing what the reading talks about, the
evolution of surveillance in society today. A chief way that we see the increasing role of
surveillance in modern society is in what the Lyon reading terms
“data-veillance”. As the volume of personal data that is available is increasing
by the second it is possible to keep surveillance of an individual by
monitoring their activities, such as a credit card purchase or their usage of
the Internet. Though surveillance certainly has benefits and uses, perhaps in
tracking a wanted criminal, this “data-veillance” naturally raises security and
privacy concerns. How much data about your private behavior should the
government and companies be able to access? Do they have the right to access
it?
Morozov addresses this concept of “data-veillance” in his
chapter entitled Less Crime, More
Punishment. Facebook has the
potential to use user data in predictive policing, if certain users are talking
about killing people or they are exchanging private messages with known drug
dealers. If one believes that there is a crime “problem” in the United States,
and you can definitely find people who affirm that, then there is a strong
tendency to want to use technology to fix it and arrest more criminals who
would otherwise go unnoticed. The “solutionism” belief is that by using
algorithms, social-media sites and police can determine which users are “most
likely” to commit certain crimes and thus prevent crime better than ever
before. The algorithms base how likely you are to commit a crime based on the
collection of personal data they can collect about you (the “pages” you like,
links you click, messages you send). Morozov notes the positive benefits of
this predictive policing, but warns that the use of this kind of data-veillance
to predict crimes could be biased, incorrect, or hyper-sensitive. As Morozov
says, “Give enough data and the right algorithms, all of us are bound to look
suspicious.” While “solutionism” says “Here is the crime problem, and here is
how to fix it”, Morozov says perhaps it is not that simple. Could our
algorithms be wrong? Could the police and/or social media sites be
over-stepping their boundaries to gather private personal messages in the name
of efficiency and prevention? Could it happen where “even tweeting that you
don’t like your yogurt might bring police to your door, especially if someone
who tweeted the same thing three years before ended up shooting someone in the
face later in the day”? I think that this example is the absolute extreme, but
Morozov’s case against “solutionist” thinking here is strong. Someone may tweet
angrily (but not seriously) about wanting to kill someone, but they have no
intent of doing so. How would an algorithm differentiate between that tweet and
someone who fully intends on following through with that threat? Though
policing and surveillance are imperfect, applying a technological “solution” to
fix the problem isn’t as cut and dry of an answer as many people would like.
In our class reading “The Relevance of Algorithms” by
Tarleton Gillespie, we were introduced to the prevalence of algorithms in
society today. By nature, algorithms are designed to include some things and
exclude others. They are a beneficial
way to sort people by interests, and personalize search results, and are widely
accepted as an important and impartial technology. In To Save Everything,
Click Here, Morozov does not bash algorithms as an idea, but rather focuses
his concern on when companies rely on their algorithms and defend their
algorithms as if they can do no wrong. Morovoz tells a story of an online
magazine called Guernica which lost
its membership in Google’s AdSense program because Google’s algorithms flagged
a short story on Guernica’s website
about “Early Sexual Experiences” as “pornographic” and Google trusted in its
algorithms. In fact, the story was by an acclaimed author, and not even close
to “pornographic” as the Internet would normally define it. Morozov
acknowledges the importance that Google’s algorithms not include pornography or
pedophilia and doesn’t mind that Google outsources work to its algorithms. But,
in what Morozov calls a classic case of “Internet-centrism”, his biggest
concern with Google is their insistence on their algorithms as neutral and
objective. Morozov argues that Google behaves as though introducing humans to
review the work of their algorithms to ensure they are neutral would be
equivocal to abandoning faith in algorithms entirely. This is the crux of
Internet-centrism, that the Internet and its capacities are a fixed entity, and
if humans wanted to change things about it, that would be impeding progress and
make things worse. It’s quite the paradox that the people who create the
Internet are insistent on not touching it afterward and letting it operate as
is all the time.
At the beginning of 19th century, the movement
towards scientific management in business expanded in influence and practice.
Frederick Winslow Taylor and William Henry Leffingwell were two names at the
forefront of this practice, seeking to maximize efficiency in the workplace. In
the name of efficiency, there would be timers to track how fast each job could
be done and then innovate a way to improve the speed at which the job was
performed. Everything in the workplace was organized to be optimal for
efficient production. The legacies of Taylor and, more so, Leffingwell are highlighted
in our reading, “The Rise of the Reenginers.” In classic fashion, Morozov
attacks the “innovators” in technology circles who believe that being able to technologically
track and quantify everything is the way to solve problems. In his opening chapter
Solutionism and Its Discontents addressing
the nature of “solutionism”, Morozov addresses the desire of people in Silicon
Valley to see an inefficiency in human life and then create an app (or the
like) to do something about it. Morozov makes a case that this kind of thinking
makes humans into robots who should do nothing but obey their “operating
system”. According to Evgeny, the human experience is full of inconsistencies
and inefficiencies, and these things aren’t necessarily problems at all! He argues
this under the scope of a new technology that would warn home cooks if they
were deviating from their chosen recipe and allow them to make corrections in
real time. While proponents of this technology say it eliminates the inefficiency
of messing up a recipe, Morozov makes a impassioned plea that cooking as an art
thrives on failure and experimentation, that deviating from recipes is crucial
to culinary innovation. Morozov calls this attempt to track people’s movements
and optimize their time in the kitchen a “quest…to turn the modern kitchen into
a temple of modern-day Taylorism…” This obsession with optimization is classic
“solutionism” and Morozov consistently argues, very persuasively, that not all
human endeavors and shortcomings are begging for a technological solution, and,
at that, shouldn’t get one. I agree with Morozov in his opinion on this matter,
though the fact that his case seems to be that the only crime of “solutionism”
here is that they are failing to preserve human culture and traditions, and
isn’t necessarily saying that “solutionism” is destructive in any other
context. His point is valid; many new technologies are developed today because
we see something as broken and want technology to fix it because it has
capability to “improve” something. Perhaps we need to redefine our definition
of “broken” and the potential consequences of attaining absolute efficiency at
the expense of a life as fallible humans.
After reading To Save Everything, Click Here, I agree
with what Morozov is talking about. Though I don’t necessarily enjoy or
appreciate how the vehement criticism of those who don’t agree with him, his
arguments for his case are compelling. Technology is a good thing and can be
very beneficial, but I believe that we could absolutely benefit from a
discussion of the potential consequences of sticking technology to every
problem, and whether or not that “problem” is even needing to be fixed.
