Evgeny Morozov’s response to Sascha Lobo : More political interference!
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To take just one unproblematic assumption from Sascha’s essay: Why assume that “the Internet” is a stable and coherent medium with well-defined properties that lend themselves to comparison with other media? Are those properties defined by physical laws or are they just the result of some corporate compromises and lobbying fights over technological standards? And if they are the result of battles that had very contingent and open-ended outcomes – and which might have been lost simply because, let’s face it, corporations today are more powerful than citizens – aren’t we simply hiding the failures of public policy under the supposedly innocent cover of medium-talk? Aren’t we explaining away the failure to invest in critical information infrastructure as just natural features of some medium called “the Internet”? Who exactly are we kidding with these rhetorical evasions?
Sascha’s essay reveals that he has traveled only half the road; his change of heart is empirical rather than ontological in nature. He has traded his earlier cyber-optimism for cyber-pessimism, rejecting the deterministic view that, on balance, anything that involves digital technology is going to promote causes favorable to democracy, intellectual debate, empowerment. However, what many of his critics don’t seem to understand is that to embrace this view is not the same as to believe that everything that involves digital technology is automatically bad.
Perhaps, cyber-pessimism is not the best term here. A better name for this outlook is cyber-agnosticism. As an ideology, it distinguishes itself by refusing to accept that there must be one firm view on the political consequences of digital technologies. And the reason for this refusal is simple: tools do not have politics; rather, ti’s the systems – made up of tools, ideologies, market incentives and laws – that do. On this reading, it’s not technology that upsets Sascha – no, it’s the fact that this technology is put to some abhorrent uses by the unholy alliance between spooks in Washington and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
The internet – an autonomous entity?
Had Sasha formulated his critique this way, I would have gladly applauded it. But, in embracing cyber-agnosticism – and the gloomy view to which the analysis of the contemporary situation has led him – Sascha reveals that he is beholden to another intellectual handicap: what I call Internet-centrism. It’s only by abandoning the latter that we might arrive at the kind of paradigm change that might shake our ontological foundations. Briefly stated, Internet-centrism is the idea that there’s some coherent logic to everything that’s happening in the digital realm – and the very existence of that realm (also known as “online” and “cyberspace”) is one of the core beliefs driving this mindset – and that we must accept that logic, for, just like the logic of the market, it’s too complex for us, humans, to understand and make sense of.
