I have no problem with technological solutions to social problems. The key question for me is, 'Who gets to implement them?' and, 'What kinds of politics of reform do technological solutions smuggle through the back door?'
Interpretation
Technological solutions can address social problems, but the implementation and the political implications behind them are crucial.
In this quote, Evgeny Morozov highlights the importance of scrutinizing who is responsible for implementing technological solutions and the underlying political motives that may accompany these reforms. He suggests that while technology can provide answers to social challenges, it is essential to consider the implications of who benefits from these technologies and how they may perpetuate certain political agendas.
In practice
During a conference on social innovation, one might quote Morozov to spark discussion about the ethics of implementing new technologies.
Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka's 'The Trial,' awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.
Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.
For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.
The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.
Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.
The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.
Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.
In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work.
India is at the vanguard of figuring out how to exploit technology and innovation on behalf of democratic accountability.
I want more Internet. I want every one of the 6 billion people on the planet to be able to connect to the Internet - I think they will add things to it that will really benefit us all.
Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.
There's an assumption that women don't start companies that earn more than X amount of dollars, or that have more than X amount of users, and Bumble is now really growing into one of the main players if you look at all the mainstream social-media platforms.
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