Evgeny Morozov’s “To Save Everything, Click Here” | Whimsley

Evgeny Morozov’s “To Save Everything, Click Here” | Whimsley:
As Steven John­son says, when his “peer pro­gres­sives” see a social prob­lem, they design a peer net­work to solve it. But what has hap­pened to the cit­i­zens in this net­work? They have been reduced to dumb fol­low­ers of sim­ple rules. The rich­ness and com­plex­ity – all the inter­est, in fact – lies in the struc­ture of the net­work. If the out­come isn’t what you want, well tweak the incen­tives, adjust the topol­ogy of the net­work, pro­vide an addi­tional option for the nodes (sorry, peo­ple) to choose from. For all its talk of bottom-up, decen­tral­ized think­ing, the Internet-centric solu­tion­ists end up with an impov­er­ished per­spec­tive of indi­vid­ual behaviour.