Note: The following review of Evgeny Morozov's To Save Everything Click Here explores the intersection between UX and political theory. For a shorter review that is targeted at a larger group of educational technologists see my review on Instructure's Keep Learning blog.
In To Save Everything Click Here, Evgeny Morozov, is, by his own
admission, the take down artist par extraordinaire. Do you have a passing regard for Clay
Shirky’s belief that the internet triggered the Arab Spring and that the
architecture of the internet might serve as a model for government? Do you perchance think as Nicholas Carr does
in The Shallows that browsing the Web
diminishes our capacity to think deeply?
Were you largely persuaded by Tim Wu’s history in the The Master Switch? Do you think that technology actually does exhibit
autonomous behaviors as Kevin Kelly argues in What Technology Wants? After reading Morozov, you might begin to harbor doubts
because he does his compelling best
to turn them into hollow idols who have fallen prey to internet-centrism (the
belief that the Internet has an essence which gives legitimacy to certain forms
of justice) and, to some degree, to solutionism.
Solutionism, as
Morozov describes it, is the attempt to impose tech fixes on social practices
that may not need fixing, as well as the concomitant effort to restrict the
spaces in which we exercise moral choices.
Morozov best illustrates this by contrasting the Berlin subway system to
the New York one. In Berlin, there are
no turnstiles or other machinery that enforce the purchase of a ticket. Of course, passengers are still expected to buy
tickets. But if you don’t you can still get on the
metro and ride it (assuming the risk that a conductor might apprehend you if
you can’t show him one). In contrast, in
New York there are turnstiles. And these
are there to prevent you from boarding unless you’ve already purchased a
ticket. Morozov argues that in Berlin
the design ensures that you have a moral choice to make (to pay or not to pay?)
whereas in New York that choice has already been made for you. The New York design, is more “frictionless” and
efficient since you can’t break the rules.
But Morozov questions whether this efficiency is actually a desirable
design since we need to exercise moral choices to be truly human.
Similarly,
Morozov questions Google’s attempt to give us driverless cars. And in a recent Slate essay he also asks the same thing about personalized
maps. While both of those technologies
may help us get to our destinations in greater comfort and with less effort, he
thinks that in diminishing our chances of getting lost or taking a wrong turn
we’ll be less likely to confront difference. After all with a driverless car
who needs to enter the public sphere or take public transportation? And with a
good map who needs to stop and ask for directions from a stranger? While confronting difference and experiencing
a moment of discomfort or disorientation might not be something that we desire
as much as efficiency, Morozov argues that those experiences are worth
preserving because they turn us into more civic beings who are better prepared
to live with the tensions and differences that are inherent in a democratic
society.
Solutionist
designs, whether they be turnstiles, driverless cars, or customized maps, may
improve efficiency and increase order.
But in Morozov’s view they limit the situations in which we are
presented with choices that have moral consequences. Against solutionist designs, Morozov suggests
that we preserve some disorder and turbulence in our lives as a way to expand
our opportunity to meet cultures and people who are other than ourselves and to
expand opportunities to grapple with moral choices.
The attack
against solutionism is made well enough in To
Save Everything. But the
relationship between design and solutionism is brought into even better focus in
Morozov’s New Republic review of
Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of Steve Jobs.
Jobs, as most of us know, was not a particularly likeable character and
didn’t have the civic dispositions that, for example, Bill Gates has displayed
in recent years in his efforts to cure malaria.
But that didn’t mean a political conscience was wholly absent, and
Morozov makes note of this conscience.
It’s illustrated in the following passage from Isaacson’s biography where
Jobs reflects on the laborious process his family went through in buying a
washing machine:
We spent some
time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended
up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we
care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or
did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did
we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking
about this every night at the dinner table. (From Walter Isaacson’s Biography Steve Jobs)
While Jobs was thinking in a
manifestly political way about his use and purchase of a technology, Morozov
argues that most commodities that Silicon Valley produces don’t provoke similar
ruminations. Apple was an exception to
this since in their 1984 commercial and their classic “Hi I’m an
Mac and I’m a PC” there’s a distinct—if ultimately duplicitous—attempt to
associate the brand with a revolutionary counter-culture. But Apple’s focus on functional and “pure” design
that “just works” (to use Job’s and Jonathan Ive’s own wording) tend to privilege and highlight the
relationship between the user and the commodity rather than the relationship
between the user, the commodity, and a larger world fraught with political and
social tensions. As Morozov puts it:
Worrying about
usability – the chief concern of many designers today – is like counting
calories on the sinking Titanic. This
obsession with usability, with making technology invisible and unobtrusive, has
created a world where we are hardly aware of how much energy our households
consume. It won’t take long until we
discover that our smartphones, in their quest for usability, also hide an
equally disturbing reality: that massive toxic dumps of electronic waste
usually find their way to cash-strapped countries. (To Save Everything, p. 336)
In his essays
and in To Save Everything Click Here,
Morozov goes through a litany of situations where the solutionist ethic (and
it’s tendency to obscure and contract the political) is present. He talks of predictive policing that is
making the spectre of Minority Report a reality, automated digital parking
meters that fail to help drivers ruminate on the philosophy and politics of parking,
and turnstiles, which we’ve already talked about above. But I think Morozov’s critique is at its
sharpest when he eviscerates Kelly McGonigal’s book The WillPower Instinct (Kelly is the twin sister of Jane McGonigal
who wrote Reality is Broken). Like nudge theorists such as Cass Sunstein, Kelly McGonigal would
like to reduce the numberof moral challenges we face as we go through life, and
whenever possible, turn them into situations where we make the right choice on
the basis of self-interest rather than on abstract moral principles. As Morozov notes:
In her analysis
of willpower, McGonigal, much like her twin sister in her analysis of
gamification, completely sidesteps all moral questions and simply treats them
as irrelevant. She argues that we need
to stop talking about behavior in moral terms, using words like ‘virtue’ and
instead focus on how our individual actions make us feel. ‘We idealize our own desire to be virtuous
and many people believe that they are most motivated by guilt and shame. But who are we kidding? We are most motivated
by getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t want. Moralizing a behavior makes us more, not less
likely to feel ambivalent about it.’ (To
Save Everything, p. 342)
Morozov’s critique instantiates a
familiar archetype and one that is his mortal disciplinary enemy precisely
because it shirks virtue:
The growing
appeal of self-tracking, nudges, gamification, and even situational crime
prevention…can only be understood in the broader intellectual context of the
last few decades. The sad reality is that philosophy, with its preoccupation
with virtue and the good life, has been all but defeated by psychology,
neuroscience, economics (of the rational choice variety)…..instead of
investigating and scrutinizing the motivations for our actions, trying to
separate the good ones from the bad, policymakers fixate on giving us the right
incentives or removing the option to do the wrong thing altogether. (To
Save Everything, p. 343)
Morozov is also alluding to a larger
ideological difference that separates him from his many enemies. He doesn’t use the term himself, but Morozov is
sympathetic to that strain of American thought known as civic
republicanism. Civic republicans hold
that people are not strictly motivated by self-interested, market-oriented
actions, and that many people like to spend their time thinking about virtue
and realizing it through civic and political activity. Like
Morozov, they stand in contrast to Americans
who live by a classical Liberal ideology (with a large L) in contrast, and who see humans as largely redeemed
through activities in the marketplace, through actions that promote self
interest, and through a life that places little or no emphasis on what virtue
is.
In a vision that
evokes Aristotle and Hannah Arendt, both of whom harbored civic republican
sentiments and regarded political action and thought as the apex of human
activity, Morozov wants to combat the
Liberal anti-political ideology that is embedded in much of solutionism. And, as he makes clear in his closing
chapter, he sees the best weapon for
this battle in “adversarial design,” a term coined by Carl DiSalvo, that favors technological solutions that deliberately
strive to create spaces for political contestation over ones that simply
emphasize usability, efficiency, and frictionlessness.
Adversarial
design is the heart of of Morozov’s answer to solutionism and its
discontents. And it’s appealing to
Morozov because it allows the practice of politics to be reinserted into the
space that geeks have created to escape politics. It is a way of injecting state-craft back
into the craftsman activities many developers have retreated to.
I’m thrilled by
Morozov’s advocacy of adversarial design because it lends substance to a type
of development work that I strive to do and that others are doing. For example, right now I’m building software
that helps students grapple with smart phone etiquette and the social and
political consequences that attend its use in different contexts. Versions of this software have some nudge effects built into them that
reflect my own vision of the good life in a digital age. So I confess that its
design (and software like it which include Freedom and Pause ) is not completely politically
neutral. However, its larger purpose is
to help student reflect on the way that digital technologies foster connection
and sociability and the contexts in which we should use these powers of
association. And it’s fulfilled this
purpose within the confines of class since students have appreciated the way
that the software provokes them to think about their relationship to technology
and to each other.
As a political theorist and software developer I
particularly appreciate Morozov’s attempt to battle solutionism by injecting
politics back into tool building.
However, I’m also cognizant of its limitations. Pace Morozov and and others who hold up the
civic republican tradition, I’m less
inclined to think of politics and morality as concerns that confer the deepest
meaning on human life. And since I work
in the company of other developers I know that they display similar
dispositions. Call me a philistine, but most of the time I’d rather be doing
something else than being a political being.
Morozov, in his erudition, summons media theorist Michael Schudson to describe this sensibility as the plight of
the “political backpacker.” Backpackers
like to go into the wilderness and spend some time cooking and camping for
themselves. But soon enough most
backpackers emerge from the wildernesss and are happy to relegate cooking and
sheltering to other entities than themselves.
Political backpackers feel analogous sentiments. Occasional forays into politics make us feel
good because they help us to grow as political beings. But most of us would consider it a curse to
spend all or even the majority of our lives in that realm. ( Even Steve Jobs,
who obviously got a jag from his very public Apple presentations reported that
he was happiest when he wandered into Jonathan Ive’s private workshop and spent time handling Apple
product prototypes. )
We want our
technologies to do the same for us as well.
For a better and richer life we want--and have a duty-- to confront our
relationship to our technology and consider how it constructs our relationship
with others and the world around us. So
our technologies shouldn’t be frictionless all the time. They shouldn’t permanently shield us from politics. But most of the time we just want our
technologies to exhibit the same behaviors that Job’s and Ive’s have glowingly
attributed to Apple’s products: “it just works!” This then is the design dilemma
we face in a nation that wants to be faithful to both its Liberal and Civic
Republican traditions: How do we develop
technologies that enlarge our capacity to be political beings while at the same
time catering to our more pedestrian and commercially oriented selves?
Morozov would
answer that we should embed a little more of our civic republican traditions
into our technologies. I know from
experience working as a software developer that the prospects for doing so are
limited. Morozov, with uncharacteristic
humility, knows this too when he says in his postscript:
As confident as
I am in my ability to take down unworthy ideas, I don’t think I can do much
about solutionism – at least, no more than I can do something about utopianism
or romanticism. …all three have a long history of abuse…we can’t rid the world
of people who want to ‘fix’ politics….we can’t rid ourselves of solutionism.
(To Save Everything, p. 355)
So solutionism is here to
stay. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
try to counter its effects by developing adversarial technologies that enlarge
possibilities for political agency.
Whatever Morozov’s faults (and the people on whom he levels his
withering criticism say he has many) he deserves accolades for giving
compelling intellectual credence to this initiative. Tool-builders --even Jobs-- shirk the political. And people involved in
statecraft rarely venture into programming craft. But in a democratic society we can’t afford
those divisions. Morozov provides one interesting avenue for bringing these
activities a little closer together.
