Evgeny Morozov 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.

You know, anyone who wears glasses, in one sense or another, is a cyborg.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.

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

Information wants to eat brie.

Surveillance cameras might reduce crime - even though the evidence here is mixed - but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.

Technology changes all the time; human nature hardly ever.

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.

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

Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.

The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively.

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.

Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.

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.

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire US government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.

The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In part, slacktivism is what happens when the energy of otherwise dedicated activists is wasted on approaches that are less effective than the alternatives.