189 Quotes by Evgeny Morozov

My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an Internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as ‘the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.’

As befits Silicon Valley, ‘big data’ is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans – and credit histories – to millions of people who currently lack access to them.

Technological defeatism – a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there’s nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms – is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We’ll come to pay for it very dearly.

In addition to their ‘do no evil’ motto, Googlers have always been guided by another, much less explicit philosophy: ‘computational arrogance.’

I’m active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle.

It’s true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call ‘moral panics,’ that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse ‘civic’ and ‘civil,’ and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.

Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it’s probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don’t see any big political consequences out of that.

The bigger the network, the harder it is to leave. Many users find it too daunting to start afresh on a new site, so they quietly consent to Facebook’s privacy bullying.