To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

Despite the fact it was published in 2013 (and there are companies mentioned that most people would've forgotten about by now -- Zynga, Zagat, and Gawker), there is still a lot in this book that can be useful for thinking about what's going on today. In fact, whole chunks of it work nicely to reflect on issues that we've already seen today (the first example that comes to mind are "fact-checking" institutions and how many people are often oblivious to the problems behind the scene, believing them to be "non-partisan" or "ideologically moderate"). More than a few times I was like "Oh, this is actually something we're seeing now."

And I'm kind of sure that's not a good thing, especially in a world where we're throwing 'advanced technology' at problems instead of trying to understand the problem. (I mean, if we were to throw any other technology at a problem, acting as if it's a panacea, people would rightfully question whether we were trying to actually do anything useful at all. "Oh, there's a lot of crime? Let's give the criminals some markers!")

There are a few issues that I take with this book. First, there's a factual error so common among white historians that it's infuriating to see someone so analytical making it: the presumption that Rosa Parks "didn't know" where she was sitting would become a "whites only" area of the bus. The fact that what she did was intentional is completely omitted in lieu of making an analogy about how her "breaking the law" (which helps change culture, it continues) would've never been possible if technology existed that could separate Black and white people without further human intervention in buses at the time. The argument could've still functioned (and probably been stronger) had he actually acknowledged that Rosa Parks' actions were an intentional act of political defiance.

Second, there are a lot of are of areas where it's assumed that we should maintain systems of governance that we have and reform them because it's the best we've got. Politically, I kind of disengaged with arguments because there were areas where he'd take shots at the wrong areas (like making generalisations around decentralisation -- there are a lot of good cases for decentralising certain aspects of our lives, and this goes out the window because he's focusing on the contradictory beliefs of right-libertarian techbros).

And the same is true of the discussion around political parties. There is no engaging with what we're actually seeing in many places and how some political parties really aren't all that different from others. Much like the people that Morozov writes about who are ignoring the problems to simply fix them with technology, he's also ignoring the underlying political and social issues of the things he 'defends'. It does make me curious where he'd fall today as a result of the atrocious pandemic response, which doesn't seem to matter which party is in power in many European or North American nations (which are the focus in this book).

Overall, not a horrible book. Some interesting ideas. Some areas needed more fleshing out (the 3 different 2-page education sections most definitely were lacking a lot of information and analysis, which I thought would've been more abundant).