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The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov

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E vgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber-utopians” had oversold the liberatory potential of the Internet. His latest book, the much-reviewed To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, continues in this vein, presenting a polemical critique of those who too readily embrace digital technology as a tool for freedom and democracy. This interview, conducted in person on May 18, 2013, in Cambridge, MA, pushes Morozov to clarify a number of the perspectives and analyses he develops in the course of the book. I | Solutionism and its Discontents Natasha Dow Schüll (NDS): In your book you write against what you call “technological solutionism”—an endemic ideology that recasts complex social phenomena like politics, public health, education, and law enforcement as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable

Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber-utopians” had oversold the liberatory potential of the Internet. His latest book, the much-reviewed To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, continues in this vein, presenting a polemical critique of those who too readily embrace digital technology as a tool for freedom and democracy. This interview, conducted in person on May 18, 2013, in Cambridge, MA, pushes Morozov…

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