Some Thoughts On Evgeny Morozov

Maria Bustillos in The Awl, “U MAD??? Evgeny Morozov, The Internet, And The Failure Of Invective”:

Because of the Internet’s meteoric growth and global reach, because of the near-magical changes it has already wrought in everything from buying a plane ticket to reading the news, it’s true that some theorists and entrepreneurs exhibit irrational exuberance about its future potential. Pretty much everyone who writes about technology at the moment appears to agree that there is too much techno-utopianism in the air, too much Internet cheerleading, and that a more deeply questioning, more nuanced tech criticism is needed. So, because Morozov approaches technology as a self-avowed skeptic–taking the position currently fashionable among tech critics–pointed criticism against Morozov himself is in effect preemptively blunted.

Overall this a great piece, though there are definitely a few things that I disagreed with, this being the first. Obviously, there is a subset of the technology culture and writers that points to this as a problem, but I don’t think “pretty much everyone” is even remotely accurate. Or at least, insofar as those who may call for these types of deep questioning are actually doing that [1. In edtech, I would point to, as an example, Sabastian Thrun, whose willingness to help put together

The Learners Bill of Rights while running Udacity – which does not hem close to, or at all, those principles – highlights the problem.] It doesn’t appear to me that the lack of deep questioning has really permeated the culture more than a superficial “we need to think more about what we’re doing” and actually resulted in a change in the way people act.

In his book Cognitive Surplus, Shirky cited Shaw in order to illustrate the effects of crowdsourced opinion on the professional kind.

Shaw is unwilling to condemn Union Square as a bad restaurant; it’s just not the kind of restaurant people like him prefer, which is to say people who eat in restaurants professionally and are happy to have a little intimidation with their appetizers. […] [But] when we can all now find an aggregate answer to the question “What is your favorite restaurant?” we want that information, and we may even prefer it to judgments produced by professional critics.

Inexplicably, Morozov’s interpretation of this is that Shirky “brims with populist, antiestablishment rage against professional critics and promises that, thanks to ‘the Internet,’ the masses can finally dispense with their highbrow pretensions.” For Morozov, Shirky’s message is that “pre-Internet meant expertise, post-Internet means populism; we are post-Internet, hence, populism.”

Except that I got no such thing from reading Shirky’s original remarks. He poked a little fun at the pretentiousness of fancy restaurant critics, it’s true, but his main point was that if we want to know places where lots of people like to go, well, now we can find out, and the availability of this knowledge necessarily alters the role of professional critics.

This is likely a result of my not having read either book (they’re both on my list, I swear!), but I do not understand what this means at all. I get Shirky’s quote; I do not get Morozov’s criticism of it, nor Bustillos’ response. I’ll have to read both those books to find out, but if anyone can clear this up, I’d appreciate some help.