To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

Extract

Whilst Evgeny Morozov is explicit that he did ‘not set out to write history’ (p. 15), his To Save Everything, Click Here may be of interest to readers of the Journal of Design History because it most certainly insists on the importance of historicizing current technologies. Morozov excoriates anyone who has ever attached a definite article to the term ‘internet’ for substantializing what must instead be acknowledged as a disparate set of practices and technologies with a wide range of historically and culturally specific potentialities, limits and dangers. Throughout the book, Morozov enlists certain histories of technology, even outlining methodological frameworks for correctly doing ‘technostructuralist’ (as opposed to technoneutral—the distinction is derived from the work of Majid Tehranian) histories, in order to make good his concluding demand that we all maintain ‘radical self-doubt’ (p. 352) about any claims that current configurations of information and communication technologies are causing revolutions, literally or metaphorically. We must ‘deflate the shallow and historically illiterate accounts that dominate so much of our technology debate and open them to much more varied, rich and historically important experiences’ (p. 357). It feels good to have a champion of these kinds of critically historical perspectives in the ‘pop tech’ press.