Just Finished Reading: To Save Everything, Click Here – Technology, Solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist by Evgeny Morozov (FP: 2013)

Can Technology in general or the Internet in particular solve all of our problems (or even most of them)? The author think the answer to that is a resounding NO. Why? Because those who are proposing their particular solutions – normally those most deeply embedded in the philosophy of ‘the Internet’ - are trying to fix problems that aren’t actually problems at all.

Peppered with countless examples of how these so-called ‘revolutionary times’ demand of us a radical rethink of everything we’ve done before (normally predicated on the old = bad/new = good dichotomy) this gripping, funny and thought provoking book is difficult to precis adequately. What is clear is that those who push ‘the Internet’ as the source code of solutionism do so either by being ignorant of or simply by ignoring the fact that similar ‘revolutions’ have happened before – notably with printing, the telegraph, radio and television that generated equally absurd claims of them heralding in a new (and very different) age allowing – or demanding – that we ditch everything that went before and start again with a new. Clean and (technologically much improved) slate. Computers, and the physical Internet they combine to create, have accelerated many of the already existing processes and (potentially at least) given many access to more but this itself is not a revolutionary break with the past. There is no great chasm in time between a world before and after the Internet came into being.

Those who believe that such a change has indeed occurred are convinced that, because we are living through an epoch changing revolutionary process, we must use the power we now have in our hands to advance the programme of change into every nook and cranny of human existence – from the way we buy books (who needs libraries when you have Amazon, e-readers and ‘the Cloud’), listen to our music (where algorithms can determine which music you’ll like before you know it yourself and can produce music to order at the touch of a button), read our newspapers (tailored to your tastes, beliefs, attention span and ability to pay), vote for our politicians (where we can listen to everything they’ve ever said and have ‘soundbites’ directed to our mobile devices reinforcing or destroying our confidence in the person, party or political process), and do our science (who needs elitist ‘experts’ when we can tap into the wisdom of crowds wiki-style to produce the next great breakthrough and where cutting edge research is crowd-sourced from the outset). What a brave new world we have to look forward to – where efficiency reigns and messy humanity is slowly eliminated through the application of more technology and greater processing power – coupled to ever greater disclosure of information so that we can be judged in the free market of ideas and traded as if we are commodities just like the things we wish to buy (and sell) to get by in a fast unforgiving world.

The author, as you might expect, will have none of it. Filled with highly intelligent and severely biting sarcasm, I found myself nodding in agreement, laughing out loud, shaking my head in exasperation (not at the author but at his unearthing of the latest stupid idea originating from Silicon Valley) and finding myself even more sceptical about the supposed advantages of the latest gadget, fad or social media website. One thing I remember making me chuckle a great deal was an honest piece of advice an Internet guru gave in an interview that if you started dating someone only to discover that they didn’t have a Facebook profile/account that you should find this very suspicious and should consider ditching them for someone with less to hide. There is even, apparently, a growing suspicion amongst global security agencies that not having a Facebook (or equivalent) presence on-line should be a red flag warning that the person is a (at least potential) subversive attempting to hide from the authorities! It made me wonder when such things are going to be made compulsory. If you do have any suspicions about the way things are going or have just wondered what the future on-line is likely to be like then this is definitely the book for you. Be warned though it might make you reconsider your on-line activities which might get you on a watch list somewhere. You have been warned!