Silicon Tanks. Yevgeny Morozov: the Prophet of Digital Skepticism

While Silicon Valley promised peace, friendship, and democracy through apps, Belarusian researcher Evgeny Morozov warned: technology is not magic, but a tool of power. Ten years ago, he was called an alarmist; today, his books are read as a guide to the digital world.

Why the criticism of "solutionism" and "internet-centrism" by Morozov has become more relevant than ever in the era of total data control and the hype around AI — read in the new issue of "Silicon Tanks" from ForkLog.

Who is Evgeny Morozov?

Evgeny Morozov is a researcher, writer, and publicist from Belarus. He is one of the most well-known and consistent critics of Silicon Valley. After studying in the USA and working at Stanford University, Morozov published two books that defined the vector of his thought and became the foundation for contemporary techno-skepticism.

Unlike many theorists, he does not merely criticize technologies. He analyzes their political and economic background. Morozov looks at Facebook, Amazon, or Uber not as services, but as powerful institutions that are changing society. For example, in an article for The Guardian, the journalist analyzes the so-called "platform capitalism" — an economic model promoted by tech giants.

According to Morozov, the desire of these companies to call themselves "platforms" is not so much an innovation as a clever move to evade traditional regulation, taxes, and accountability. They do not produce goods or provide services directly, but merely connect suppliers with consumers. This allows them to have enormous market value with minimal assets and staff.

The key idea of the article is that the real power of "platforms" lies not in the core service, but in the control over the periphery: payment systems, identity verification, location data, and algorithms. These auxiliary elements have become central, and whoever owns them dictates the rules of the entire industry.

"The world of 'platform capitalism', despite its intoxicating rhetoric, is not so different from its predecessor. The only thing that has changed is who puts money in their pockets."

"Network Delusion": How the Internet Failed to Bring Democracy

Morozov's first major work is the book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (2011). In it, he criticizes "cyber-utopianism" — the naive belief that the internet and social networks automatically promote the spread of democracy and lead to liberation from authoritarian regimes. The author argues that reality is much more complex and grim.

The main idea of Morozov is that the same technologies that activists use to organize protests are used by dictatorial governments for their purposes with even greater effectiveness. Authoritarian regimes have learned to use the internet for mass surveillance of citizens, identifying dissenters, spreading pro-government propaganda, and manipulating public opinion. In his view, the internet has become a powerful tool for consolidating power rather than undermining it.

"The West's obsession with the liberating power of the internet is based on a deeply flawed understanding of how authoritarian regimes operate."

The author also introduced the concept of "slacktivism." He criticized the idea that online activities, such as likes, reposts, or signing petitions, constitute a full-fledged political struggle. Such activities create an illusion of participation in politics for people, but do not require real risks and efforts, distracting from more complex and effective forms of protest in the real world.

"Authoritarian governments will not fall due to a few sarcastic tweets".

Morozov's book is a call for a more sober and critical view of the role of technology in politics. Morozov argues that the internet is merely a tool, and its impact is entirely dependent on the social and political context in which it is used.

"Attribute the establishment of democracy to the internet — it's like thanking the blacksmith for the sword's ability to kill."

Critique of "solutionism": when a hammer sees only nails

The second landmark book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013), targets the very ideology of Silicon Valley. Morozov introduces the term "solutionism."

Solutionism is the belief that any complex social, political, or cultural problem can be solved with a simple and elegant technological solution. Typically, this is through an app, platform, or algorithm.

1. The problem of obesity? Here is an app for counting calories. It ignores economic reasons, the availability of healthy food, and psychological factors.
2. The problem of ineffective public administration? Let's implement a "smart city" with sensors everywhere. This will solve the traffic jam problem, but it will create a total surveillance system and hand over control of urban infrastructure to private IT corporations.
3. The problem of political apathy? Let's create a platform for online voting. This will simplify the process, but it will not solve the problem of lack of trust in political institutions and will not improve the quality of the political debates themselves.

According to Morozov, solutionism is dangerous because it offers simple answers to complex questions. It makes us forget about the context and focus on what can be measured and optimized, ignoring everything else. Instead of reforming imperfect institutions (courts, parliaments, healthcare systems), solutionists propose to "fit" a technological "crutch" into them, which only masks the problem and sometimes even exacerbates it.

In the book, the author urges readers to be more skeptical of technological "panaceas" and to remember that many important human and social issues are not engineering problems but require political debate, moral choices, and compromises.

"The biggest sin of solutionists is their intellectual blindness, their inability to see the world as a chaotic, complex, and unpredictable place. They want to believe that if they have a hammer ( in the form of technologies ), then every problem is a nail."

From Criticism to Action: The Syllabus

In recent years, Morozov has shifted from pure criticism to creating an alternative. His new project — The Syllabus — is a media platform that seeks to address the issue of the information flow imposed by social media algorithms.

Data: The Syllabus.Modern news feeds show us what elicits an immediate emotional response, rather than what is truly important and useful for understanding the world. The Syllabus operates on a different principle. The project uses technology to analyze thousands of sources (academic articles, lectures, podcasts, videos), but the final selection and curation of content is done by expert humans.

The goal is to provide the user not just snippets of news, but deep, contextualized content on the most important topics: from climate change and international politics to the future of artificial intelligence. Essentially, this is an attempt to create a healthy information diet in contrast to the digital fast food from tech giants.

Key ideas and goals of the project:

• fighting against superficial content — offers a "healthy information diet" consisting of complex but important information;
• providing context - not just gives references, but helps to understand why a particular material is important;
• Interdisciplinarity — helps to build bridges between technology, politics, sociology, economics, and culture;
• creating an alternative — an attempt to build infrastructure for serious intellectual labor in an era when attention has become the main commodity.

The Syllabus is aimed at researchers, scholars, journalists, analysts, politicians, students, and anyone who wants not just to consume news but to deeply understand the processes occurring in the world. This is a paid service, which emphasizes its independence from the advertising model that thrives on clickbait.

Morozov and the Crypto Industry: Common Enemies, Different Paths?

At first glance, Morozov's ideas should resonate with the crypto community. Like supporters of decentralization, he criticizes the monopoly of Google and Meta, opposes "walled gardens," and condemns the surveillance economy. They share a common enemy — the centralized power of tech giants.

However, Morozov is extremely skeptical about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. In his articles and speeches, he often places them alongside other manifestations of techno-solutionism. From his point of view, the belief that blockchain can "fix" trust, corruption, or inefficient bureaucracy is the same mistake that early proponents of the internet made.

The Syllabus has a whole section dedicated to cryptocurrencies, in the description of which Morozov stated that the public discussion about digital currencies is intellectually impoverished and one-sided. On one side are the critics, who superficially label everything as fraud. On the other, and this worries him more, are the "true believers," mainly venture capitalists, who shape public opinion in their own interests.

To address this issue, Morozov launched The Crypto Syllabus. Its goal is to provide intellectual resources to help journalists, scholars, and anyone interested critically and deeply analyze crypto phenomena from blockchain to NFT.

Morozov asserts that the discussion of crypto technologies cannot be separated from a broader context: the history of finance, geopolitics, and the relationship between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. He believes that at this point, the crypto sphere is mainly a "set of solutions in search of problems."

He is also skeptical of "crypto-libs," urging them to prove why their decentralized solutions are more effective in combating global capitalism than other political strategies, such as the democratization of central banks.

What's next?

The works of Evgeny Morozov are more relevant today than ever. Against the backdrop of AI development, his warnings about "black boxes" that make decisions for us sound particularly ominous. His criticism of solutionism makes us ponder: are we not trying to "solve" the problem of human creativity with ChatGPT, and the problem of decision-making with algorithms whose logic we do not fully understand?

Morozov does not offer simple answers and does not descend into Ludditism. He calls for sobriety - forcing us to ask uncomfortable questions: who benefits from this technology? What problem does it really solve, and what problem does it create? And are we not trying to fix a broken world by simply pressing the "Save All" button? In an era when technologies promise us everything, the ability to ask the right questions becomes the main asset.