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To Save Everything, Click Here Spiral-Bound | 2014-03-04

Evgeny Morozov

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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

In the very near future, "smart" technologies and "big data" will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such "solutionism" affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vices in disguise? What if some friction in communication is productive and some hypocrisy in politics necessary? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything -- from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity -- by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior we may also change the very nature of that behavior. Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement -- but only if we keep solutionism in check and learn to appreciate the imperfections of liberal democracy. Some of those imperfections are not accidental but by design.

Arguing that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the moral consequences of digital technologies, To Save Everything, Click Here warns against a world of seamless efficiency, where everyone is forced to wear Silicon Valley's digital straitjacket.
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Original Binding: Paperback
Pages: 432 pages
ISBN-10: 1610393708
Item Weight: 1.0 lbs
Dimensions: 5.4 x 1.0 x 8.1 inches
"Evgeny Morozov calls himself a 'digital heretic,' and he is right to do so. Against the reigning consensus--that there is a digital fix for every social and political problem, and that thanks to the technologies that we group together for convenience's sake as the Internet, the brave new world of the future will be one of endless, limitless improvement in every realm of life--Morozov offers a sophisticated, eloquent, and definitive rebuttal. Technological 'solutionism,' he argues, is the romantic utopia of our age, and, like Communism or the free market fantasies of Reagan and Thatcher before it, it is one more god doomed to fail. In our ahistorical, gadget obsessed, and self-regarding age, Morozov's skeptical, modest humanism will doubtless engender fierce resistance. But then, that is the tribute that self-delusion has always paid to reason. Voltairean in its lucidity, To Save Everything, Click Here is not just a brilliant book, it is a necessary one."


Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of the Republic of Estonia
Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, a New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and winner of Harvard's Kennedy School's 2012 Goldsmith Book Prize. He is a senior editor to the New Republic. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, and many other publications. His monthly column comes out in Slate, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), El Pais (Spain), Corriere della Sera (Italy), and several other newspapers. He was born in Belarus.