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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Evgeny Morozov Quotes

Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.

– Evgeny Morozov

It’s true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call ‘moral panics,’ that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

– Evgeny Morozov

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.

– Evgeny Morozov

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

– Evgeny Morozov

If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it’s not really obvious where we would be. So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.

– Evgeny Morozov

I want my government to do something about my privacy – I don’t want to just do it on my own.

– Evgeny Morozov

Whether greater cybersecurity requires a greater sacrifice of our digital freedoms is an important debate that we should be having, preferably with all the facts in front of us.

– Evgeny Morozov

Dictators aren’t stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook.

– Evgeny Morozov

In business, standards establish the rules of the game, creating path dependencies as investments are made and corresponding designs are set in stone and plastic. Inferior standards can prevail due to smart marketing or industry collusion.

– Evgeny Morozov

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

– Evgeny Morozov

Apple has an opening to say, ‘The tools we are selling to you will enable you to do things rather than do things for you.’ Google’s vision is tools that will do things for you.

– Evgeny Morozov

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.

– Evgeny Morozov

North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.

– Evgeny Morozov

There is no doubt that the Internet brims with spamming, scamming and identity fraud. Having someone wipe out your hard drive or bank account has never been easier, and the tools for committing electronic mischief on your enemies are cheap and widely accessible.

– Evgeny Morozov

Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.

– Evgeny Morozov

The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.

– Evgeny Morozov

However revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn’t altered the basic law of human communication: Being nice to your interlocutors is a good way to start any negotiations, particularly, when being hostile is an open invitation for a cyber-fight.

– Evgeny Morozov

In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.

– Evgeny Morozov

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.

– Evgeny Morozov

You actually see liberals checking ‘Fox News,’ if only to know what the conservatives are thinking. And you’re seeing conservatives who venture into liberal sources, just to know what ‘The New York Times’ is thinking.

– Evgeny Morozov

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.

– Evgeny Morozov

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.

– Evgeny Morozov

If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public – the authorities show up and arrest everyone.

– Evgeny Morozov

For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.

– Evgeny Morozov

Social media’s greatest assets – anonymity, ‘virality,’ interconnectedness – are also its main weaknesses.

– Evgeny Morozov

The newspaper offers something very different from Google’s aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.

– Evgeny Morozov

You know, it’s not a given that there is an ‘online’ and ‘offline’ world out there. When you use the telephone, you don’t say that I’m entering some ‘telephono-sphere.’ You don’t say that, and there is no obvious need to say that when you are using a modem.

– Evgeny Morozov

I want to prevent us reifying ‘the Internet’ as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American Constitution as it was written.

– Evgeny Morozov

We’ve never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It’s been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they’re always the enemy.

– Evgeny Morozov

Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google.

– Evgeny Morozov

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