To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism [Paperback]

In the very near future, “smart” technologies and “big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vices in disguise? What if some friction in communication is productive and some hypocrisy in politics necessary? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything—from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity—by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior we may also change the very nature of that behavior. Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement—but only if we keep solutionism in check and learn to appreciate the imperfections of liberal democracy. Some of those imperfections are not accidental but by design.

Arguing that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the moral consequences of digital technologies,To Save Everything, Click Herewarns against a world of seamless efficiency, where everyone is forced to wear Silicon Valley's digital straitjacket.

Evgeny Morozov(@evgenymorozov) is the author ofThe Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, aNew York TimesNotable Book of 2011 and winner of Harvard's Kennedy School's 2012 Goldsmith Book Prize. He is a senior editor toThe New Republic. His articles have appeared in theNew York Times, theFinancial Times, theEconomist, theWall Street Journal, theLondon Review of Books, and many other publicationl#}