The always awesome Maria Bustillos adds some desperately needed nuance to the “Internet, yay! Internet, oh no!” debate that’s currently personified by naive techno-utopianist Jeff Jarvis and slash-and-burn polemicist Evgeny Morozov.
Whatever may be wrong with Silicon Valley startup culture (and I am the first to agree that there is plenty) is not wrong with the whole of the Internet. Nor is there anything stopping anyone with a better idea of how to manage online political activism or recycling or restaurant reviews from trying it out this very minute. That’s the beauty part of the Internet (which, yes, is a thing that exists, despite Morozov’s ludicrous claims to the contrary).
Morozov fails to make a meaningful distinction between the particular frailties of technologists and the regular human kind. Human beings have always had problems; have always attempted to solve them using available means; have sometimes, to some degree, fallen prey to irrational optimism about their chances of success (and prey, as well, to Eeyore-like melancholy and pessimism regarding those same chances).
U MAD??? Evgeny Morozov, The Internet, And The Failure Of Invective – The Awl