Evgeny Morozov famous quotes

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Bullying #Privacy #Bigger

[People] somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#People #May #Rooms

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Erosion #Self #Goal

Technology changes all the time; human nature hardly ever,
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Technology #Human Nature #Humans

This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Mistake #Information #Bigs

This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Real #Iran #America

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Technology #Government #Degrees

When we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, 'Sex and the City,' or maybe funny videos of cats.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Sex #Cat #Rights

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Play #Hypocrisy #Political

For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Running #Struggle #Opportunity

Google’s vision is tools that will do things for you.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Google #Vision #Tools

For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms; anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia's mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Strong #Issues #Lists

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Safety #Citizens #Driving

Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of 'open government'; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Government #Doors #Age

Cyberattacks have become a permanent fixture on the international scene because they have become easy and cheap to launch. Basic computer literacy and a modest budget can go a long way toward invading a country's cyberspace.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Country #Long #Cyberspace

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Mistake #Mean #Artist

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Media #Pressure #Action

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Wall #Tools #Calling

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Technology #Thinking #Criticism

When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen - that's a direct quote - it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Running #People #Democracy

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Technology #Thinking #Would Be

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

#Technology #Thinking

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

#Moving #Technology #Faithful

Cloud computing is a great euphemism for centralization of computer services under one server.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Clouds #Computer #Centralization

Information wants to eat brie.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Want #Information #Brie

One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Thinking #Intellectual #Twenties

Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Book #Ends #Publishing

In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. KGB ... used to torture in order to get this data.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Past #Kgb #Order

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Technology #Ipods #Chinese

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Needs #Entering #Use

You actually see liberals checking 'Fox News,' if only to know what the conservatives are thinking. And you're seeing conservatives who venture into liberal sources, just to know what 'The New York Times' is thinking.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#New York #Thinking #News

Would you like all of your Facebook friends to sift through your trash? A group of designers from Britain and Germany think that you might. Meet BinCam: a 'smart' trash bin that aims to revolutionize the recycling process.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Smart #Thinking #Groups

Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it's because youths don't have jobs. Or you might say that's because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Jobs #Doors #House

When we can commit a crime, we can also trigger debate. Cases go to courts. Media start covering the cases. But once you build smart environments where, if you meet a certain probabilistic profile, you won't even be allowed to board a bus, let alone commit a crime, we're perpetuating existing laws so they face no challenges or revision.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Smart #Media #Law

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

#Smart #Technology #Risk

As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Band #World #Growing

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Data #Hype #People

I'm active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Ipads #Kindles #Active

I'm not on Facebook. I have a sort of anonymous account that I check, like, once every six months every time Facebook rolls out a new feature.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Months #Six #Checks

I'm rarely invited to start-up parties, but who cares about their trinkets and apps anyway?
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Party #Who Cares #Apps

If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public - the authorities show up and arrest everyone.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Want #Revolution #Authority

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

#Philosophy #Evil #Arrogance

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Space #House #Google

In short, Google prefers a world where we consistently go to three restaurants to a world where our choices are impossible to predict.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Choices #Google #Three

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

#Technology #May #Information

It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Genius #Chance #Easy

Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn't.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Goal #Noble #Loan

Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Military #War #Want

Mobile phones are one of the most insecure devices that were ever available, so they're very easy to trace; they're very easy to tap.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Insecure #Phones #Easy

Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Wikileaks #Diplomats #Candid

Much of the real computer talent today is concentrated in the private sector.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Real #Today #Talent

Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#May #Revolution #Democratic

Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Google #Networking #Social

Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Media #Weakness #Social

The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Media #Dying #Egyptian

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.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Believe #People #Google

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

#Smart #Technology #Data

To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Political #Needs #Lessons

As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Running #Silence #Libertarian

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Government #Want #Privacy

A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Party #Media #Political

The Internet can empower groups whose aims are in fact antithetical to democracy.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Empowering #Democracy #Groups

One possible future for WikiLeaks is to morph into a gigantic media intermediary - perhaps, even something of a clearing house for investigative reporting - where even low-level leaks would be matched with the appropriate journalists to pursue and report on them and, perhaps, even with appropriate NGOs to advocate on their causes.
-- Evgeny Morozov

#Media #House #Wikileaks