DLD14 - Against Solutionism (Evgeny Morozov)

I love Evgeny Morozov, and the feisty back-and-forth he gets into at the end is really the core of the debate he’s having with the tech industry: the problem isn’t “technology”; the problem is the way we think about and relate to technology and the socio-political structures around them.

That said, I do think the questioner’s POV is valid: at least in this talk, he doesn’t articulate any particular action we’re supposed to take as a result of his ideas. It’s all pretty much grounded in changing the way we think about it.

Granted, I’m a fairly big believer in the idea that what we do and how our society is structured is, in a lot of ways, a result of the way we think about things, and that our actions (and by extension, our society) will change if we think differently about the way we approach things. However, I do think that if the problem, as he says, is our venture capitalists, then even changing the way we think about the problem isn’t by default a solution to the problem. At least for us as outsiders.

So that changes who his audience is, really; he’s not talking to regular people so much as he’s talking to the industry. Those within, those with the power and control, have to buy into his vision of technology as inherently political, that the design decisions (and even the decision to make a particular piece of technology at all) is inherently political. That algorithms are inherenetly political.

Unfortunately, so far, while I’m sure he’s influential, I’m not really convinced his ideas are sticking in the minds of those who’s minds need sticking.