189 Quotes by Evgeny Morozov

We’ve never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It’s been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they’re always the enemy.

If the only hammer you are given is the Internet, it’s not surprising that every possible social and political problem is presented as an online nail.

Social media’s greatest assets – anonymity, ‘virality,’ interconnectedness – are also its main weaknesses.

Faster roads are not always safer roads – and virtually all societies, democratic or authoritarian, prefer safety over speed, even if many of their citizens enjoy fast driving.

A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don’t understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook.

Surveillance cameras might reduce crime – even though the evidence here is mixed – but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.

You know, it’s not a given that there is an ‘online’ and ‘offline’ world out there. When you use the telephone, you don’t say that I’m entering some ‘telephono-sphere.’ You don’t say that, and there is no obvious need to say that when you are using a modem.

Calling China’s online censorship system a ‘Great Firewall’ is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.

Steve Jobs was notoriously blunt about products he found wanting, but his attack on Flash – Adobe’s popular technology for playing multimedia content inside a browser – was particularly vicious. Claiming it was buggy and insecure, Jobs banned it from the iPad.