It ’ s me versus internet, says web culture critic

VGENY Morozov is an author well known for his viciously mocking criticism of web culture — with some rather odd technological habits of his own.

Promoting his challenging new book, To Save Everything Click Here , the Belarusian journalistturned-academic revealed he stores his smartphone and broadband router in a time-locked safe to limit his access to the internet. He even stores his screwdrivers in the safe to prevent him circumventing the time lock.

Morozov is now at the tail end of a tour in which he has delivered his message against technology “solutionism” — his term for the tendency among Silicon Valleyenamoured policy-makers to delegate responsibility to gadgets, software and an all-seeing internet.

He brushes off criticism of his habits, however.

“I have no problem with the safe, frankly. It fits very well with my vision for technology. It’s okay to delegate certain things to technology,” he insists.

“I tried to analyse what’s wrong with me delegating the decision of whether or not to check my e-mail on an hourly basis to technology and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it, ethically and morally.”

Morozov has quickly made a career for himself as the fiercest critic of Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley powers, and their acolytes in the press, academia and, increasingly, government.

Until last August, he waged his campaign as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, the birthplace of Google and a stronghold for “the internet” as an entity in and of itself that humanity is bound to protect and shape the world around.

“There are clearly a lot of people inside computer science and business studies promoting Silicon Valley ideas that I find very suspicious,” he said.

“For Google, they do think there is a broader logic to ‘ the internet’. They are more internet-centrists, which is a term I use a lot in the book, and have this tendency to see a dominant spirit tying internet services together and trying to form political and social institutions based on the lessons we learn from ‘ the internet’.

“Larry and Sergey [Page and Brin, Google’s founders and current leaders] have weird ideas about the world out there and those ideas they developed in the mid-1990s when they were at Stanford.

“I do think they genuinely believe their own rhetoric on things like having search implanted in our brain.”

One characteristic of the “solutionism” favoured by Google, Morozov says, is that it attempts to solve problems that do not exist. He contrasts the approach with that of Google’s rival Apple, which does not attract suspicion on the same scale and “presents itself as a mature company that is not run by adolescents, unlike Facebook or Google”.

“Apple has an opening to say the tools we are selling to you will enable you to do things rather than do things for you,” he says. “Google’s vision is tools that will do things for you.”

But what is the solution to solutionism?

What can an ordinary citizen without the time or inclination to embark on an ethical and moral analysis of the impact their use of technology is having on their life do to avoid a dystopian nightmare?

“I want to prevent us rarefying ‘ the internet’ as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American constitution as it was written,” says Morozov.

“We need to act not only as consumers, refusing or accepting services. We need to push policymakers to get involved. If that means creating a digital library that is publicly funded, for instance, rather than rely on Google Books, then we roll up our sleeves, invest money and do it.”

He sees his role as part purveyor of common sense, part ruthless destroyer of “internet studies ” as a discipline. His next project, scheduled to take up to six years, is a full intellectual history of the internet from the 1950s.

“It’s me versus the internet.” — © Daily Telegraph. London