I finally got around to finishing Catch-22,[1. Which is still a great, hilarious book.] and I’ll probably be starting and blogging about both Morozov’s books. My plan right now is to write a blog post about each chapter as I go. I figure it would be easier to tackle his ideas one at a time than trying to write one post about the whole book.

Given that, I thought this would be a good time to bring up this piece in Democracy Journal about tech intellectuals. Kind of an interesting take if you ask me:

The most extraordinary example of these contradictions is the well-known cyber-pessimist Evgeny Morozov. Trolls–commentators who flout the norms of a given community in order to spur angry responses–are ubiquitous on the Internet. Morozov’s success shows how trolling can be a viable business model for aspiring public intellectuals.

Morozov is a Belarusian who has received fellowships from the Open Society Institute, Yahoo!, the New America Foundation, and Stanford University. He once believed that new technologies had great political benefits, but has spent the last several years vigorously and repeatedly denouncing the “techno-utopianism” and “Internet-centrism” of other technology-focused public intellectuals. His brand identity is harsh denunciation. Morozov’s first book, The Net Delusion, took aim at some of the more ludicrous claims about how the Internet spread democracy worldwide. His second, To Save Everything, Click Here, tries to do the same trick for technology-focused efforts to “solve” problems as varied as fixing potholes and stopping terrorism.

Morozov owes his success to an instinctive genius for leveraging the weaknesses of the system against itself. He shows how the attention economy can be hacked by someone sufficiently dedicated to making himself into a public nuisance. Morozov attacks prominent public intellectuals of technology, denigrating their motivations and distorting their arguments (sometimes to the point of intimating that these people are saying the opposite of what they do say). He then purports to refute the caricatures that he himself has created, and waits for the outraged reaction and ensuing controversy to attract attention.

To take a few examples: In his most recent book, Morozov depicts MIT Media Lab researcher Ethan Zuckerman, who repeatedly argues against grandiose claims that the Internet will bring the world closer together, as insisting that “the reason people from Idaho have not yet talked to people from India–except when on hold with a call center in Bangalore–is that [inadequate] technology somehow has stood in the way.” Likewise in Morozov’s telling, Jonathan Zittrain, who wants open-Internet advocates to accept the need for security and safe zones, becomes a zealot opposed to gatekeeping in nearly every form. Lessig, a notoriously mild-mannered constitutional law professor, is condemned for his “fanatical dedication to the religion of Internetcentrism.” The unflappable Clay Shirky “brims with populist, antiestablishment rage.” And so on.