Evgeny Morozov: To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013)

“Our society is at a crossroads. Smart technology is transforming our world, making many aspects of our lives more convenient, efficient and – in some cases – fun. Better and cheaper sensors can now be embedded in almost everything, and technologies can log the products we buy and the way we use them. But, argues Evgeny Morozov, technology is having a more profound effect on us: it is changing the way we understand human society.

In the very near future, technological systems will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions into many more areas of public life. These are the discourses by which we have always defined our civilization: politics, culture, public debate, morality, humanism. But how will these disciplines be affected when we delegate much of the responsibility for them to technology? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything – from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity – by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifiying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical and civic behavior, do we also change the very nature of that behavior? Technology, Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement – but only if we abandon the idea that it is necessarily revolutionary and instead genuinely interrogate why and how we are using it.

From urging us to drop outdated ideas of the Internet to showing how to design more humane and democratic technological solutions, To Save Everything, Click Here is about why we will always need to consider the consequences of the way we use technology. ”

Publisher PublicAffairs, 2013
ISBN 161039139X, 9781610391399
433 pages

review (Kevin Driscoll, LA Review of Books)
review (Siva Vaidhyanathan, Bookforum)
review (Steven Poole, The Guardian)
review (Pat Kane, The Independent)
review (Adam Thierer, Reason.com)
Interview (with Terry Winograd, Boston Review)

Publisher

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Furball 0: On Wikileaks, Bitcoin, Copyleft: Three Critiques of Hacktivism (2013)

“While most expressions of hacktivism lack this revolutionary vigour expressed in one of the later communiques by now infamous hacking collective AntiSec, hacktivism is widely appreciated for its radical potential. Wikileaks and hacking crews are considered by some as anarchist special forces striking blows against the forces of domination. Bitcoin is regarded as a practical approach to break the power of capital. Free software is thought of as a model for future production beyond capitalism. We disagree.

This booklet collects our writings on activism in the digital realm produced over the last few years. In our piece on Wikileaks — which first appeared in Kittens #1 — we critique Wikileaks’ appreciation of the bourgeois-democratic state which persecutes it. The article on Bitcoin — which previously appeared in Mute Magazine Vol. 3, No. 3 — deals with the political economy of the digital currency and critiques the Libertarian ideology driving it. Finally, our piece on free software and other digital commons — which has not previously been published — portrays how ‘copyleft’ software licences are still expressions of appreciation for the social conditions we are forced to live under.

All three pieces critique both the fallacies inherent in the reasoning behind these projects as well as left-wing hopes attached to them. As such, it might strike the reader as arrogant sneering from the sidelines. However, this is not the intent of this work. We hold that the project of transforming the existing social conditions must start from a correct understanding of these conditions to avoid reproducing them. In this spirit, this booklet is an invitation to critique.” (from the Foreword)

Publisher The Wine & Cheese Appreciation Society of Greater London, London, January 2013
46 pages
via Marcell, via Anthony

publisher

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Jean Dubuffet: Asphyxiating Culture (1968–) [FR, PT, CZ]

“Jean Dubuffet’s only and a particularly significant book, Asphyxiating Culture is a philosophical and political discussion which elucidates his antagonistic stance towards culture and its influence on the public domain of art and the private domain of creativity.

In his anti-culturalism, he posited the realm of culture against that of the individual, and saw culture as equivalent to the state and the police. To him, it represented bureaucracy, propaganda, patriotism, indoctrination, capitalism, the status quo, and illusory coherence. The individual, however, was the keeper of the creative spirit and the domain of the common man. The individual exemplified rebellion, independence, creativity, nature, diversity, and eclecticism.” (source)

French edition
Publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1968
Expanded edition published by Les éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1986, 124 pages

MA thesis on Dubuffet (Samantha Krukowski, 1992)
Dubuffet’s sound recordings (UbuWeb)

Asphyxiante culture (French, expanded ed., 1968/1986, added on 2014-2-2)
Cultura asfixiante (Portuguese, trans. Serafim Ferreira, 1971, no OCR)
Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writings (English sample, trans. Carol Volk, 1988, pages 7-12)
Dusivá kultura (Czech, trans. Ladislav Šerý, 1998, no OCR)