Tom Slee on Evgeny Morozov’s “To Save Everything, Click Here”

Tom Slee, Whimsley, March 2013

Every­body loves Jane Jacobs.  I love Jane Jacobs and "Aus­trian" econ­o­mists with whom I dis­agree, like Alex Tabar­rok, love Jane Jacobs.Steven John­son says he loves Jane Jacobs in his recent book Future Per­fect, and so does Evgeny Moro­zov at the begin­ning of To Save Every­thing, Click Here – but Moro­zov is argu­ing against John­son. You prob­a­bly love Jane Jacobs.

So some­one has to be wrong. Much of this essay is an attempt to see why Moro­zov gets Jacobs right, while John­son and oth­ers are miss­ing some­thing important.

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From 2005 to 2007, Evgeny Moro­zov tells us, he thought that dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy might be a way to rid the world of auto­cratic regimes. His dis­il­lu­sion­ment was chan­nelled into his influ­en­tial first book, The Net Delu­sion, a full-on attack on "the sheer cal­lous­ness and utopi­anism" of the "Inter­net Free­dom" project (p 354).

This time around, Morozov's tar­get is much broader, but still cen­tred in the world of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, and par­tic­u­larly the Inter­net. He takes aim at the ide­olo­gies that have grown up around the Inter­net, and their many manifestations.

Chap­ter 7 is typ­i­cal of the book. Here is a col­lec­tion of peo­ple who record and track their every­day lives online, and then ana­lyze and quan­tify their exis­tence, from tooth­brush­ing to read­ing to fecal con­tents. These "data­sex­u­als" now have a social move­ment, of a sort, which they call the "Quan­ti­fied Self" move­ment. It would be easy to dis­miss the Quan­ti­fied Self­ers as harm­less eccentrics if they did not have a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence among the opin­ion shapers and lead­ing lights of Sil­i­con Val­ley, and if the mind­set they embody was not clearly present, if in mod­er­ated form, in the wider dig­i­tal world, and if the assump­tions and goals were not ooz­ing out over the rest of us. From quan­ti­fy­ing one­self in a pri­vate con­text it is a short step to the pre­sen­ta­tion of self through these num­bers, and the use of them as a basis for opti­miza­tion and refine­ment. So Moro­zov cites Reid Hoff­man, founder of LinkedIn, who says that self track­ing is a way to "acknowl­edge that you have bugs, that there's new devel­op­ment to do on your­self" (237) so that we can algo­rith­mi­cally mea­sure, tweak, and refine our­selves and our self-presentation to the world.

From here it is just one more short step to the buy­ing and sell­ing of our per­sonal data: to insur­ers in return for lower pre­mi­ums, to adver­tis­ers in return for bet­ter deals. Our per­sonal data becomes a new "asset class" and exec­u­tives respond by "try­ing to shift the focus [of debate] from purely pri­vacy to what we call prop­erty rights" (235). New social pres­sures emerge as the dig­i­tiz­ers fol­low their path of bits, algo­rithms and mar­kets (career coun­sel­lors now rou­tinely rec­om­mend that build­ing a strong pres­ence on LinkedIn is a route to a bet­ter job), and we can replace debates about pri­vacy with reas­sur­ances about per­sonal choice. "Pri­vacy is mostly an illu­sion, but you'll have as much of it as you want to pay for" says Kevin Kelly (236). New com­pa­nies emerge to opti­mize our self-presentation on the web (reputation.com), new norms emerge as "If you're going out with some­one, and they don't have a Face­book pro­file, you should be sus­pi­cious" (Slate's Farhad Man­joo, quoted on p. 239). Why would you not share your real-time blood alco­hol lev­els with your employer if you don't have any­thing to hide? (240).

The impact of the dig­i­tal on our lives is such that, while the social con­se­quences of self-tracking seem immense, they are just one thread among many of the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion. In sep­a­rate chap­ters, Moro­zov inves­ti­gates new devel­op­ments in polic­ing, arts and cul­ture, pol­i­tics, gov­ern­ment, social engi­neer­ing, civic life, health, the work­place, and the increas­ingly designed, archi­tected envi­ron­ments in which we live. There is no aspect of life that isn't ready to be tweaked, nudged, hacked and fil­tered into opti­mal performance.
How to respond to such a flood of changes? One is tempted to define one­self by an atti­tude to dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies them­selves: to be unequiv­o­cally pro– or anti-technology. But to reject or to accept tech­nol­ogy whole­sale has no future: whole­sale rejec­tion entails rejec­tion, not just of inte­grated cir­cuits, but of the peo­ple con­nected by them: shap­ing the use of tech­nol­ogy lies not in the realm of indi­vid­ual choice, but of social choice. Whole­sale accep­tance seems fatal­is­tic – aban­don­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of hav­ing any say in the forces shap­ing the soci­eties in which we live.

Moro­zov under­takes two projects, one suc­cess­fully and one less so. The first is to pro­vide a frame­work in which to think about the new inven­tions that are being sold to us, and the pat­terns of thought behind them. Moro­zov iden­ti­fies a twin-tracked ide­ol­ogy behind the inven­tions and inven­tive­ness of the dig­i­tal world. One track is "Internet-centrism" – the prac­tice of "tak­ing a model of how the Inter­net works and apply­ing it to other endeav­ours". Writ­ers have imbued the Inter­net with "a way of work­ing"; it has a "grain" to which we must adapt; it has a cul­ture, a "way it is meant to be used", and it comes with a mythol­ogy in which iTunes and Wikipedia become mod­els to think about the future of pol­i­tics, and Zynga is a model for civic engage­ment (15). The sec­ond track is "solu­tion­ism": the recast­ing of social sit­u­a­tions as prob­lems with def­i­nite solu­tions; processes to be opti­mized (23).

Moro­zov does a fine job of artic­u­lat­ing Internet-centrism and solu­tion­ism as two facets of a sin­gle Sil­i­con Val­ley ide­ol­ogy, whose fol­low­ers include the Valley's soft­ware indus­try lead­ers, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, con­fer­ences and "thought lead­ers", as an evo­lu­tion of the "Cyber­selfish" ide­ol­ogy iden­ti­fied a decade ago by Paulina Bor­sook. The com­mon assump­tions, shared biases, and indi­vid­u­al­is­tic predil­ic­tions give a cohe­sive­ness and homo­gene­ity to the new ideas and inven­tions, actively con­struct­ing and shap­ing the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment from which they claim to draw their inspi­ra­tion. The insis­tence on "dis­rupt­ing" our social and envi­ron­men­tal lives; the idea that the solu­tions inspired by and enabled by the Inter­net mark a clean break from his­tor­i­cal pat­terns, a never-before-seen oppor­tu­nity – these mean that the only lessons to learn from his­tory are those of pre­vi­ous tech­no­log­i­cal dis­rup­tions. The view of soci­ety as an institution-free net­work of autonomous indi­vid­u­als prac­tic­ing free exchange makes the social sci­ences, with the excep­tion of eco­nom­ics, irrel­e­vant. What's left is engi­neer­ing, neu­ro­science, an under­stand­ing of incen­tives (in the nar­rowly util­i­tar­ian sense): just right for those whose intel­lec­tual pre­dis­po­si­tions are to algo­rithms, design, and data struc­tures. Moro­zov argues that these ortho­dox­ies have had "a cor­ro­sive effect on pub­lic dis­course and on reform projects" (16) and it's dif­fi­cult to argue otherwise.

Morozov's approach to unpick­ing the hid­den assump­tions of solu­tion­ism, and the unpalat­able con­se­quences of its appli­ca­tion, is impres­sive but less suc­cess­ful. In order to avoid a blan­ket technopes­simism he makes two moves. The first is to adopt a broadly social con­struc­tion­ist approach to the world of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. The Inter­net does not shape us, it is shaped by the soci­ety in which it is grow­ing. He is with Ray­mond Williams, against Mar­shall McLuhan. His stance here is blunt: he refuses to see "the Inter­net" as an agent of change, for good or bad. "The Inter­net" is not a cause; it does not explain things, it is the thing that needs to be explained. Chap­ter 2 is titled The Inter­net Tells Us Noth­ing (Because It Doesn't Actu­ally Exist).

The sec­ond, more sur­pris­ing move, is to adopt a cri­tique that was first described in a pejo­ra­tive sense by Albert Hirschmann. "In his influ­en­tial book The Rhetoric of Reac­tion, Hirschmann argued that all pro­gres­sive reforms usu­ally attract con­ser­v­a­tive crit­i­cisms that build on one of the fol­low­ing three themes: per­ver­sity (whereby the pro­posed inter­ven­tion only wors­ens the prob­lem at hand), futil­ity (whereby the inter­ven­tion yields no results what­so­ever), and jeop­ardy (whereby the inter­ven­tion threat­ens to under­mine some pre­vi­ous, hard-earned accom­plish­ment)" (6). Moro­zov does not see him­self as a con­ser­v­a­tive, but instead places him­self in the tra­di­tion of other thinkers who have stood against pro­grams of orga­nized effi­ciency; "Jane Jacobs attacks on the arro­gance of urban plan­ning, Michael Oakeshott's rebel­lion against ratio­nal­ists in all walks of human exis­tence, Hans Jonas's impa­tience with the cold com­fort of cyber­net­ics; and, more recently, James Scott's con­cern with how states have forced what he calls 'leg­i­bil­ity' on their sub­jects" (7). The list is an inter­est­ing one because, as I men­tioned at the begin­ning, it fea­tures the same cast of char­ac­ters that the solu­tion­ists — those whom Moro­zov opposes so implaca­bly — rou­tinely invoke as their own inspirations.

The Hirschmann frame­work pro­vides Moro­zov with a recipe for how to think about the many solu­tion­ist ini­tia­tives he tack­les, and many of the pas­sages in the book have a sim­i­lar struc­ture. Let's return to self-tracking for a moment. Morozov's first line of cri­tique is Hirschmann's "jeop­ardy": he invokes the 'tech­nos­truc­tural­ists' to ask not just what indi­vid­ual choices self-tracking offers, but to ask how it changes the envi­ron­ment we inhabit. A deci­sion not to share becomes a tacit acknowl­edge­ment that you have some­thing to hide. The dan­ger is that "if you are well and well-off, self-monitoring will only make things bet­ter for you. If you are none of these things, the per­sonal prospec­tus could make your life much more dif­fi­cult, with higher insur­ance pre­mi­ums, fewer dis­counts, and lim­ited employ­ment prospects" (240). It erodes pri­vacy, the abil­ity to make a clean start, and erodes risk-taking behav­iour given the con­se­quences of fail­ure. A sec­ond line of cri­tique is to ask what, as our quan­tifi­able aspects become the focus of atten­tion, is miss­ing in the quan­ti­fied por­trait that emerges: what intan­gi­ble aspects of our­selves become invis­i­ble. Do these num­bers, he asks, miss mean­ing? Where do ethics and aes­thet­ics go to in a world of num­bers? Moro­zov sur­veys the centuries-old debates over the virtues and per­ils of quan­tifi­ca­tion. Here the cri­tique stum­bles, as Moro­zov rolls out thinker after thinker in a parade of rea­sons to doubt the ben­e­fits of quan­tifi­ca­tion. From Niet­zsche to Nuss­baum, from nutri­tion­ism (the quan­tifi­ca­tion of food) to water-metering and the evo­lu­tion of clothes-washing norms, to the ben­e­fits of fric­tion and dis­so­nance in our every­day lives, there is no doubt he cov­ers an impres­sive amount of ground, but the argu­ment is scat­ter­shot; dis­joint. The end result is an eru­dite and widely-sourced list of the ways in which tech­nolo­gies may lead to bad out­comes – but it is still a list, and it lacks the force of a strong cen­tral the­sis behind it.

The other chap­ters fol­low a sim­i­lar pat­tern: the per­ver­sity, futil­ity, and jeop­ardy of solu­tion­ist agen­das show a breadth of inves­ti­ga­tion that should shame many of his more pop­ulist oppo­nents, and pro­vide valu­able con­texts in which to think about tech­no­log­i­cal pro­grammes. In par­tic­u­lar, his insis­tence on seek­ing out his­tor­i­cal prece­dents for today's argu­ments is a wel­come change from the lan­guage of "rup­ture" that many solu­tion­ists prefer.

If there is a uni­fied point of view behind the cri­tique, it can be traced back to the "anti-solutionists" with whom Moro­zov iden­ti­fies. Like Moro­zov and like Steven John­son, I'm a big admirer of Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great Amer­i­can Cities, and James Scott's See­ing Like a State: which makes me won­der how can they end up in such dif­fer­ent camps. The fault, you will not be sur­prised to hear, belongs with the solutionists.

One of the remark­able insights of com­puter sci­en­tists (and social sci­en­tists and nat­ural sci­en­tists in the com­puter age) is an under­stand­ing of how great com­plex­ity and diver­sity can be gen­er­ated by pop­u­la­tions of sim­ple agents fol­low­ing sim­ple rules. Just as schools of fish and flocks of star­lings cre­ate sweep­ing artis­tic dis­plays by pur­su­ing sim­ple indi­vid­ual rules, so the rich tapes­try of city life emerges from sim­ple every­day inter­ac­tions. The ideas of net­work the­o­rists lend them­selves to talk of self-organization, non-hierarchical struc­tures, and infor­ma­tional cas­cades. Com­puter sci­en­tists take ideas such as the "Game of Life", the stun­ning images of frac­tal shapes, and the rich behav­iour of net­works to illus­trate how com­plex­ity arises from sim­plic­ity. From spin-glasses in mag­nets to the sort­ing and emer­gence of pat­terns revealed by Schelling and his intel­lec­tual descen­dants, sim­ple "micro­mo­tives" give rise to sur­pris­ing and intri­cate pat­terns of "mac­robe­hav­iour". Such agent-based think­ing seems at first to mesh per­fectly with Jacobs's closely observed stud­ies of city life. She famously focused her pierc­ing, ana­lyt­i­cal eye on the details of every day life in large cities, and used her obser­va­tions to chal­lenge and then tri­umph over the grand visions and arro­gance of top-down city plan­ners. It's the bottom-up nature of her approach that inspires: the plan­ners are try­ing to impose pat­terns on pop­u­la­tions from above but they miss the rela­tion­ship between the large and the small. It is tempt­ing, then, to take the descrip­tions of Jacobs's cities and encode them in algo­rithms: agent-based sim­u­la­tions of the effects of block size on pedes­trian traf­fic pat­terns seem almost man­dated, so obvi­ous a next step do they seem from Jacobs's chap­ter on the topic.

Yet this step, I increas­ingly believe, is a mis­take. Solu­tion­ism is ulti­mately cen­tral plan­ning by another name. The arro­gance of the urban plan­ner reap­pears as the arro­gance of the agent-based mod­eller and the Inter­net entre­pre­neur: the plan is still mono­lithic, but now takes the shape of a net­work. As Steven John­son says, when his "peer pro­gres­sives" see a social prob­lem, they design a peer net­work to solve it. But what has hap­pened to the cit­i­zens in this net­work? They have been reduced to dumb fol­low­ers of sim­ple rules. The rich­ness and com­plex­ity – all the inter­est, in fact – lies in the struc­ture of the net­work. If the out­come isn't what you want, well tweak the incen­tives, adjust the topol­ogy of the net­work, pro­vide an addi­tional option for the nodes (sorry, peo­ple) to choose from. For all its talk of bottom-up, decen­tral­ized think­ing, the Internet-centric solu­tion­ists end up with an impov­er­ished per­spec­tive of indi­vid­ual behaviour.

Just because com­plex and rich behav­iours can arise from sim­ple rules doesn't mean that peo­ple are sim­ple beings. Any approach that applies both to mur­mu­ra­tions of star­lings or spin-glasses of mag­netic ions as well as to cities of humans is, almost by def­i­n­i­tion, miss­ing the dis­tinc­tive fea­tures of human soci­eties. Com­plex­ity can arise from sim­plic­ity at the small scale, but macro-level com­plex­ity also arises from micro-level com­plex­ity. The sub­tle and ill-understood nature of our own needs and inter­ac­tions will defeat the best efforts of solu­tion­ist plan­ning, just has it has defeated those of cen­tral plan­ning and of free markets.

In his final chap­ters, Moro­zov appeals to this par­tic­u­lar­ist view of the world, in which each node of a net­work is dif­fer­ent from oth­ers, and in which gen­eral solu­tions don't exist. To dis­card the impor­tance of the details of our daily inter­ac­tions, as the solu­tion­ists inevitably do, is to inevitably pro­voke unex­pected responses, unin­ten­tional side effects, and unan­tic­i­pated break­downs of the solu­tion­ist schemes. When Brian Chesky of AirBnB com­plains that there are 30,000 dif­fer­ent cities in which he wants to oper­ate, and that it's just not prac­ti­cal to nego­ti­ate with each one, he is not design­ing a bottom-up solu­tion, he is impos­ing a top-down net­work. He is demand­ing that cities become "leg­i­ble" in James Scott's ter­mi­nol­ogy, to his over­ar­ch­ing (and sim­plis­tic) algorithms.

To reach for an alter­na­tive vision, Moro­zov looks to artists who have engaged in "adver­sar­ial design" to illus­trate the impor­tance of acknowl­edg­ing micro-level com­plex­ity. But to look to the arti­fi­cial­ity of the arts is second-best here; there is enough vari­a­tion and rich­ness of detail in the nor­mal every­day world to illus­trate the impor­tance of vari­a­tion and local knowl­edge and unan­tic­i­pated interactions.

But despite these minor com­plaints, "Click Here" is an admirable and sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment. It iden­ti­fies and makes a valu­able and intel­lec­tu­ally adven­tur­ous assault on what is becom­ing an increas­ingly obvi­ous prob­lem: the appro­pri­a­tion of demo­c­ra­tic and "bottom-up" visions by those who seek to impose their own top-down net­works on the rest of us, and who reduce us to sim­plis­tic nodes in the process. This is a valu­able book: now if only some­one could make a TED Talk of it.