{"id":5764,"date":"2015-03-26T14:41:39","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T20:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5764"},"modified":"2017-02-27T10:30:45","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T15:30:45","slug":"a-litmus-test-for-technology-critics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5764","title":{"rendered":"Evgeny Morozov has a litmus test for technology critics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"needle\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Evgeny Morozov has\u00a0written, in The Baffler<\/em>, a critique<\/a> of technology criticism in the guise of a review of my book The Glass Cage<\/em>. He makes many important points, as he always does\u00a0\u2014 Morozov’s intellect is admirably\u00a0fierce and hungry \u2014\u00a0but his conclusions about the nature and value of technology criticism are\u00a0wrong-headed, their\u00a0implications\u00a0pernicious. Morozov wants to narrow the sights of such\u00a0criticism, to declare as invalid any critical approach\u00a0that isn’t consistent with his own. He wants to establish an ideological litmus test for technology critics.\u00a0As someone who approaches the question of technology, of tool-making and tool use, from a very different angle than\u00a0the one Morozov takes,\u00a0I’d like to respond with\u00a0a word or two in defense of an open and pluralistic approach\u00a0to technology criticism, rather than\u00a0the\u00a0closed and doctrinaire approach that Morozov advocates.<\/p>\n

First, let me deal quickly with the personal barbs\u00a0that are one of the hallmarks of Morozov’s brand of criticism. At one point in his review, he writes, “Carr doesn\u2019t try very hard to engage his opponents.” This odd remark \u2014 there are plenty of people who disagree with me, but I hardly see them as “opponents” \u2014 says much about Morozov’s psychology as a critic. He is always trying hard \u2014\u00a0very, very hard \u2014 to “engage his opponents.” You sense, in reading his work, that there\u00a0is\u00a0a\u00a0hot, sweaty wrestling match forever playing out in\u00a0his mind, and that he\u00a0can’t stop\u00a0glancing up at the scoreboard to see where things\u00a0stand. No\u00a0opportunity to score a point goes\u00a0unexploited.\u00a0It’s this wrestling-match mentality that explains\u00a0Morozov’s tactic of\u00a0willfully distorting the ideas of other writers \u2014 his “opponents” \u2014 in order to make it easier for him to add to\u00a0his score. The writer Steven Johnson has summed up<\/a> Morozov’s modus operandi\u00a0with precision:\u00a0“He\u2019s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business.”\u00a0With Morozov, a fierce intellect and a childish combativeness would seem to be two sides of the same personality, so it’s probably best to ignore the latter and concentrate\u00a0on the former.<\/p>\n

Morozov is disappointed that a “radical” political viewpoint is not more prominent in\u00a0discussions of the role of technology in American culture. Technology criticism, at least in its popular form, concerns itself mainly, he says, with “what an ethos of permanent disruption means for the configuration of the liberal self or the survival of its landmark institutions, from universities to newspapers.” Radical political approaches to technology criticism, particularly those that\u00a0place\u00a0“technology, media, and communications within Marxist analytical frameworks,” go largely unnoticed. That\u00a0certainly seems an accurate assessment. I think the same could be said about any popular discussion about any aspect of American culture. Marxist analytical frameworks, though\u00a0prized\u00a0in academia, cut no ice in the mainstream. Maybe that reflects a flaw in American culture. Maybe it reflects a flaw in the frameworks. Maybe it reflects a bit of both. It is in any case one\u00a0symptom of the general narrowing of our public debates. In an earlier critique of technology criticism, published in Democracy<\/em>, Henry Farrell\u00a0argued<\/a> that our\u00a0intellectual life\u00a0has in general been\u00a0constrained by a highly\u00a0competitive\u00a0“attention economy” that pushes popular debates into a safe middle ground.\u00a0To be radical, whether from the left or the right (or any other angle), is to be peripheral. The public intellectual\u00a0has turned into an intellectual entrepreneur, selling a basket of bland ideas\u00a0to a market of easily distracted consumers.<\/p>\n

It’s easy, then, to agree with Morozov that there’s something lacking\u00a0in contemporary American technology criticism. A\u00a0broader discussion of technology, one that makes room for and indeed welcomes strongly political\u00a0points of view, including all manner of radical ones that question\u00a0the status quo, would enrich the conversation and perhaps give it a greater practical force. Except that that’s not really what Morozov wants. Morozov has come to believe\u00a0that the only\u00a0valid technology\u00a0criticism\u00a0is political criticism. In fact, he believes that the only valid technology criticism is political criticism that shares\u00a0his own particular ideology.\u00a0“Today,” he writes at a crucial juncture in his review, “it\u2019s obvious to me that technology criticism, uncoupled from any radical project of social transformation, simply doesn\u2019t have the goods.” The only critics fit to answer the hard questions about technology are those “who haven\u2019t yet lost the ability to think in non-market and non-statist terms.” Only those with a “progressive agenda,” indeed\u00a0an “emancipatory political vision,” can pass the litmus test; every one else is ideologically suspect.\u00a0Morozov, always eager to point out any definitional fuzziness in other people’s vocabularies, doesn’t bother to define precisely what he means by radicalism or progressivism or social transformation or an emancipatory political vision. One assumes, though, that he will be the judge of what is legitimate\u00a0and what is not. Anyone who doesn’t toe the Morozov line will be branded\u00a0either a “romantic” or a “conservative” and\u00a0hence deemed\u00a0unfit to have a voice in the conversation.\u00a0“Carr is extremely murky on his own [politics],” Morozov declares at one point, casting aspersion in the form of suspicion.<\/p>\n

What particularly galls Morozov is any\u00a0phenomenological critique of technology, any\u00a0critical approach\u00a0that begins by examining\u00a0the way that the tools people use shape their actual experience of life \u2014 their behavior, their perceptions, their thoughts, their relations with others and with the world. The entire tradition of such criticism, a rich and vital tradition that I’m proud to be a part of, is anathema to him, a mere distraction from the political. Just as Morozov ignores my\u00a0discussion of the politics<\/a> of progress<\/a> in\u00a0The Glass Cage<\/em> (to acknowledge it might complicate\u00a0his argument), he blinds himself to the political implications of the work of the phenomenological philosophers. To explore the personal effects of tool use is, he contends, just\u00a0an elitist\u00a0waste of time, a frivolous bourgeois pursuit\u00a0that he reduces to\u00a0“poring over the texts of some ponderous French or German philosopher.” What we\u00a0don’t understand we hold in\u00a0contempt. Because he has no interest in\u00a0the individual except as an elemental political particle, not a being but an abstraction, Morozov concludes that technology criticism is a zero-sum game. Any time spent on the personal is time not spent on the political. And so, in place of pluralistic inquiry, we get dogmatism. An argument that might have been expansive and welcoming becomes a sneering\u00a0and self-aggrandizing\u00a0exercise in exclusion.<\/p>\n

“Goodbye to all that,” Morozov writes, grandly dismissing all of his own earlier work that does not fit neatly into his new analytical\u00a0frameworks. Apparently, he has recently experienced a\u00a0political awakening. It’s a shame, though not a surprise, that it has come at the cost of an open mind.<\/p>\n

Photo: Juan Ramon Martos<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evgeny Morozov has\u00a0written, in The Baffler, a critique of technology criticism in the guise of a review of my book The Glass Cage. He makes many important points, as he always does\u00a0\u2014 Morozov’s intellect is admirably\u00a0fierce and hungry \u2014\u00a0but his conclusions about the nature and value of technology criticism are\u00a0wrong-headed, their\u00a0implications\u00a0pernicious. Morozov wants to narrow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5764"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7707,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions\/7707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}