Beware of the dark side of the internet, says Evgeny Morozov

Another day, another internet doomsayer.

Only this one is so sceptical that he even puts quote marks around “the internet” itself.

A visiting scholar at Stanford University and Slate magazine columnist, Evgeny Morozov has become the latest writer to publish a critique of the internet and to challenge how we use it.

It follows the publication of Who Owns the Future, by computer scientist maverick Jaron Lanier, who Channel 4 News spoke to earlier this month – and coincides with the launch of the Channel 4 News Data Baby project, tracking the data we casually hand over online.

A technology writer and theorist, Mr Morozov, argues in his new book that our notion of the internet as a single, neutral network, is worryingly inaccurate – and that this idea occupies too central a place in our lives.

This, he says, has made us too focused on internet-related solutions to petty problems. We use the internet to look at all manner of moral, social and political problems within the frame of how big data and technology can solve them – but crucially, we do not think about what we want to achieve.

Speaking in London on Friday, Mr Morozov said his ideas can be summed up by two terms: “solutionism” and “internet centerism” (more quote marks), both of which are causing us to sleepwalk into huge changes in the way society operates.

The clue is in the long-winded title of his new book: To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist.

Notes from a great talk and discussion from Evgeny Morozov this morning @nesta_uk #nestaEvgeny twitter.com/kirsty_joan/stâ?¦

— Kirsty Joan Sinclair (@kirsty_joan) March 22, 2013

Political accountability

Take the open data and open government movement, promoted by the Wiki groups and European internet pirate parties.

Mr Morozov says that its supporters believe having access to all the data that exists is, in itself, the solution to a more democratic society. A government can be transparent by the act of opening its databases, for example.

“‘Open’ now means data,” he said at a discussion hosted by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta). “It used to mean accountability.”

Instead he says we need to approach the future by looking at what needs to be reformed, without being so dismissive of the political institutions that exist.

After all, many of the corporations who own networks within the internet can be much more shady and secretive than public institutions in the non-virtual world, adds Mr Morozov – a point Mr Lanier might agree with.

The political implications of solutionism are obvious, especially in these austerity-ridden times, the Belarus-born writer argues. Governments, he said, could quite easily move from asking: what needs to be achieved? To asking: what can we do with what we have?

Personal vs national ‘liberation’

How does this impact the average internet user?

Mr Morozov is big on -isms, buzzwords and academic references. But his message is simple: think before you click.

“We have stressed personal liberation over our national liberation,” he said, pointing to Google Now and self-tracking devices as evidence. At the moment, those who choose to wear a device tracking their exercise and calorie-consumption can benefit from extra insurance sweeteners, if they can prove how healthy they are.

But Mr Morozov argues this will eventually lead to those who opt out being punished and seen as having something to hide.

And as online services are developed to keep the individual in check, the government is able to sit back instead of solving problems.

He wants us, and policy-makers, to stop asking; “Is there an app for that?”. To question our tendency to frame all problems in the context of what technology can do to help and instead, think about what problem is the most useful to solve.

Ideally, a pop-up window would tell us exactly how many sites Facebook and Google is sharing our information with – and put it in context of how many sites would have existed ten years ago, for example.

Mr Morozov’s ideas may seem like they are aimed at a future which is a long way away.

But the debate on big data, the digital world – and how we fit into it – is well under way.