Like a series of ill-considered tattoos, hashtags blemish the new Allen Hall, embarrassing tokens of our digital age. On the front door, one sees #GoAllenGo, along with the SOJC’s Twitter handle, @UOsojc. Elsewhere, in classrooms and hallways, one can find #Ethics #Innovation #Action, #LifeAsAJStudent and, uh, #JSwag. This hashtagging of Allen is certainly obnoxious and pointless, but unlike most things I write about — like, say, people’s adoration of Macklemore — I do not think it’s an indication of civilization’s inexorable descent into infantile barbarism. However, somebody does.
Evgeny Morozov is a man to take very seriously, namely because he is a very serious man. He possesses the dour authority of a Belarusian scholar, which is precisely what he is. Along with thousands and thousands of words published in numerous places and numerous languages, Morozov has written two books that explore and critique our relationship with “the Internet” (he would insist on the scare quotes): “The Net Delusion,” which dared to assert that perhaps, despite utopian claims, the Internet isn’t a liberating force against authoritarianism after all, and, most recently, “To Save Everything, Click Here,” a polemic against “solutionism” (the idea that the world can be saved one app at a time) and “Internet-centrism,” a worldview that sees the Internet as a totalizing, inherently progressive institution from which nothing in politics and culture can escape.
On Tuesday, Morozov spoke at the university’s Turnbull Center in Portland, mostly to an audience of people born before computers, let alone “the Internet.” And now is probably a good time to address those quotation marks. According to Morozov, the notion that there is a singular Internet out there, one somehow imbibed with a sense of self or purpose, is a falsehood, a myth upon which gadget-geek solutionists have built a technocratic religion.
“There is something almost sacred about the Internet,” Morozov said at a Future Tense discussion earlier this year. “I’m trying to secularize it.”
His task is a considerably difficult one — the alluring promise of iSalvation is hard to argue against — but it is necessary. Not because belief itself is a bad thing, (people believe things all the time; I believe Ke$ha is great!) but because this particular belief distorts our understanding of what it means to be a good citizen in society and reconfigures our relationship with each other in a way that should be worrying.
Solutionist fixes require “nudges” or incentives in order to work. If we’re ever going to reach the computerized promised land, we will have to be automatons.
“Some people would say that we shouldn’t just get people to do the right thing,” said Morozov. “We should get people to do the right thing for the right reason.”
Otherwise, Morozov warns, we will become nothing more than robotic clusters of data, consuming and responding without self-awareness or reflection. The solutionist vision of utopia demands that we destroy what it means to be a human being.
This kind of thinking also distorts our understanding of the corporations that help foster the myth of “the Internet.” Google is here to make money, not save our souls. “Don’t be evil” is a slogan, not an ethos. Alas, though they’re not spiritual shepherds, we still may be sheep.