Evgeny Morozov Technology Quotations

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

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.

Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time - so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?

Technology changes all the time; human nature hardly ever,

I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.

As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable.

'Solutionism' for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection - by means of technology - without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.

The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.

The message I'm trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology - they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.

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.

A faithful lifehacker would use technology to avoid dead time and move on to the entertaining, more gratifying activities as soon as possible.

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.

I don't think love for technology itself breeds change.

If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it's not really obvious where we would be. So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.

Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.

When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.

iPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters.