From The Correspondent:
Spring, 2018. Evgeny Morozov is standing on a rubber mat in a hotel room in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The world’s foremost technology critic is scared. He’s afraid of dying knowing that there are books he doesn’t know about.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of books are strewn around the room. On the floor, on the chair, on the bed, under the bed, next to the bed. There’s an open book on a desk in front of him. He uses an iPad to snap pictures of its pages, flipping them at great speed with two fingers. On a good day, he scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day.
Morozov scans books he believes he should read someday. He knows which ones to read because he has devised a system that can determine the relevance of every book in the world. And his system isn’t just for books. It’s for all information and knowledge.
It was on that rubber mat in Massachusetts that The Syllabus . . . was born. Essentially, it’s a site that recommends the very best and most relevant books, podcasts, scientific articles, videos and journalism to anyone who wants a better understanding of the world.
But there’s more to The Syllabus. Morozov wants to make people think. The Syllabuscriticises how information and knowledge are discovered and disseminated online, based as they currently are on clicks, likes and shares. In other words, based on popularity. Morozov is building a system that determines the relevance of information in a new way – a way that might even be better than Google.
You read that right: Morozov, the most prominent critic of Silicon Valley, has started an online service with a mission as megalomaniacal as many tech companies.
. . . .
How did I get to know Morozov? As a journalist trying to get to grips with the influence of technology on society and our lives, the Belarusian writer has been indispensable to me for more than 10 years.
I first heard of him in 2008, when he was blogging for several US websites. He was in his twenties then, writing articles that made him notorious: he ripped into entrepreneurs, trend watchers and others who preached about a digital utopia. He tore their utopian visions to shreds – and visibly loved doing it. “This is a book that should’ve stayed a tweet,” he wrote about tech guru Jeff Jarvis’s latest book.
I also know him from the very first time I interviewed him in 2013, which didn’t end well.
I asked: “In your latest book, you strongly criticise journalists who write about technology. They don’t understand what technology is and are not at all critical. What can journalists learn from your ideas?”
His reply? “Why are you asking me? You’re the journalist, aren’t you?”
. . . .
Morozov disputes the popular idea that “the internet” and “digital” are unique phenomena, that these technologies are drivers of a revolutionary era, and that the iPhone, Google, and Uber are unprecedented inventions – innovations, even! – made possible by the exceptional genius of Silicon Valley’s tech nerds.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Morozov consistently shows that digital technology is an extension of existing systems, not independent of history and political-economic reality. Silicon Valley, for example, was created because the US government invested in technologies to win the Cold War. Google’s search engine algorithms were funded by US ministries. During the 2008 financial crisis, cities in the western world eased the rules for renting out houses, allowing residents to earn a little on the side and enabling Airbnb to grow rapidly.
Link to the rest at The Correspondent
And here’s a link to The Syllabus