

O'Reilly on  Morozov - saidajigumi
http://io9.com/annalee-i-think-you-do-a-real-disservice-to-both-open-466738177

======
bcoates
With some strategic skimming I think I've been able to get at the point of
Morozov's essay: It's a complaint about the corruption (or "pollution") of
language. Given the 20th century that's a reasonable thing to worry about: in
retrospect, language is often the canary in the coal mine, warning of the
approach of Fascism.

The problem is that his argument doesn't really come together. He rightly
makes fun of "Web 2.0" as a pointless buzzword, but that's a complaint beyond
it's sell-by date. Nobody says that with a straight face anymore, except as a
vague marker for a time-period of website fashion. It's not a concept anyone
associates with anything of serious importance. He also makes a side-remark
about '“Open,” “networks,” and “information”' that I don't really get:
_networks_ and _information_ are mostly used in a rigorous technical sense by
the tech community as far as I can tell.

His main thrust is reserved for "open", but he doesn't really make the case
here either; there's a long retelling of the old free software vs. open source
battle, but promoting a new, roughly descriptive term to draw a distinction
between two things is hardly the stuff of Goebbels. This is apparently being
extended into "Open government".

This, as far as I can tell, is the core point arrives: Morozov can put up with
transparency and accountability, but extending that into "open government"
that obligates government agencies to permit the public to collaborate with
them is not ok. This reduces government into provider-of-services, a set of
replaceable parts like the NIH or the Federal Highway Administration that
either do their task or don't, and if they don't, can be changed.

This is a very sad, small box to put the government into if you've become
emotionally invested in the idea of the state as the manifestation of our
collective will. In this world, the "political and moral principles" of the
government are of central importance and the primary goal of politics is to
petition this god-state into a benevolent and not evil ruler by ensuring that
it is not blind to the concerns of everyone.

This is where his point kind of falls apart, as he doesn't seem to quite
distinguish the problems with the evil all-containing-god-state (Singapore,
more or less) from the problems with the technocratic, apolitical, one-
institution-among-many service-provider state that he claims O'Reilly is
pushing for. Lumping these two opposites together makes the whole argument
kind of mushy.

------
akuzi
Morozov is tapping into a current of thought that is becoming increasingly
popular. It's the same sentiment that has triggered a backlash against TED
talks - a backlash against attractively packaged memes that are being sold
using slick conference talks or other forms of effective marketing. This
sentiment is partly driven by a skepticism about what is really being
marketed. Is it the idea or is it really personal influence, consulting
careers and book sales?

It's easy to apply this type of skepticism to O'Reilly media which promotes
endless ideas such as 'Big Data' rebranding old technology and approaches as
new, invalidating any previous concerns with data privacy and the like. I
think we as an industry take the memes too seriously and with too little
critical thought.

~~~
_delirium
I agree TED is a bit of a nexus for it. In my circles I see a sort of backlash
(or maybe, better, buyer's remorse) directed at TED being fairly broad,
hitting many people who wouldn't read more than a few sentences of Morozov.
But then Morozov thrusts a dagger into that wound for a subset of people. For
people who _never_ liked any of that stuff and just think society is going
downhill with all this technological nonsense, Morozov has less appeal,
because you've already got Nicholas Carr and many other people for that angle.

You mention ideas vs. packaging/motives, but I think I've gotten more
skeptical about the style of idea as well. Skepticism of the
marketing/book/speaking-tour angle probably plays a role in that, but the
ideas increasingly seem sort of fluffy. I like to think TED was better back
when I was more positive on it, but I've re-watched a few older talks I recall
liking, and they seem to have aged poorly, at least for me. I don't have
anything against popularizing science, but I can't find much in the TED
archives anymore that reminds me of what I think of as _good_ popularized
science, up to the gold standard of a Carl Sagan. It more often reminds me of
motivational speakers and self-help gurus, the kinds of ideas you see on a CNN
segment or something: _new science says [amazing revelation that will change
your life]_. The Onion parody floating around [1] caricatures some of the
rhetorical style pretty well. The style somehow seemed fresh at the time, but
looking back on older TED talks now, they seem not all that different from
stuff I was already familiar with earlier, a certain genre of lightly science-
flavored "idea" stuff that's existed since at least the '70s. Maybe with
better production values— some of the '70s stuff seems a lot more embarrassing
even now.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s>

~~~
tunesmith
That's a really interesting point, I hadn't considered that before now. There
are a couple that I still really like, but I also think many of them
legitimately were more interesting than they would be now - not because their
information is dated, but maybe just because people have more connected
knowledge bases now...?

------
saidajigumi
This is an article by Annalee Newitz with a reply by and ensuing discussion
with Tim O'Reilly. I found this highly relevant to the recent HN post re:
Evgeny Morozov's "The Meme Hustler"[1].

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472759>

~~~
melloclello
I can't imagine this kind of reactionary thinking will go down too well here
on HN...

Edit: btw have you read Moldbug's recent column on Sam Altman? [1] He uses
Altman as a similar example of a fake progressive, though doesn't really touch
on the whole open government side of things

[1] [http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/sam-a...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html)

------
yk
As I read it, Morozov's essay has two main points:

1\. Propaganda is now self referential. Especially that the selling point of
"Government 2.0" is an analogy to "Web 2.0" and "Open," where neither "Open"
nor "Web 2.0" has any kind of meaning to begin with.

2\. A specific consequence of this is, that the policy debate is no longer
about the goals of a policy but about manipulation of meaningless symbols.

It is then quite interesting to read O'Reilly's comments, since he actually
does not refute (or even criticizes ) Morozov's points, but only asserts again
that 'Open Government' is a better way to archive some policy goals.

This is of course a highly subjective and somewhat unfair compression of an
interesting exchange, but functional for my main point: I completely agree
both with Morozov and O'Reilly, just on different levels. Morozov does indeed
raise very good questions. On the other hand, open government is an important
tool to archive some policy goals, at least for some definition of open.

------
mrbill
_"It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source
software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the
result of clever manipulation and marketing."_

Okay, even after reading and re-reading that, and the paragraphs around it for
context, I still want to go "wat." She needs to clarify there was no such
_term_ as "Open Source", not no such _idea_.

------
anigbrowl
Annalee Newitz comes across as very disingenuous here, to say the least. But
then it _is_ a Gawker site. Oh well.

Props to Tim O'Reilly for discussing what is basically a hit piece with good
humor.

~~~
tunesmith
I agree - the tone of her comments is so different than that of her article
that it seems like a completely different person.

------
zby
Morozov is sometimes worse than Steve Yegge. I like some of his critique - but
if he omitted all the personal snipes he could probably compress it ten times.

He also seems to be polarizing on purpose:

 _Can Twitter build a button so that users can indicate how offensive my
tweets are? I'd really love that: like "Favorites" - perhaps "Hates"?_

 _Because, at least on this end, there's some anxiety that my tweets are not
offensive enough._

<https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov/status/319107461250424832>

------
xcasex
Evgeny Morozov, while a talented writer, is a curmudgeon. To me, he reads like
the lovechild of Dvorak and Ann Coulter, with none of the finesse ;)

------
danso
> _Also, what Morozov fears is quite reasonable, if you look at the history of
> government regimes that have murdered and forcibly relocated their citizens
> in the name of productivity and (yes) openness._

Really? What regimes have murdered in the name of openness? And let's not
mistake what regimes claim to do with what they actually do. China's Great
Leap Forward waved equality as a banner, yet I don't see the resulting
horrific famine as being a reason to roll back civic rights in America

Edit:

I read this passage a couple but cannot figure out what it means -- the OP is
describing how open source arose from the free software movement:

> _The problem was that companies could sell free software, but they weren't
> always happy about the public mucking around in their code and changing it.
> So O'Reilly helped a group of entrepreneurs come up with the alternative
> term "open source" software, which described a bunch of different licenses
> that people could use to release software in ways that free software would
> not allow. You might say that open source allowed companies to release code
> that was partly open, but partly closed._

O'Reilly already weighed in pretty effectively...but the OP must be referring
to _something_ that happened in reality...right? Was there a company that got
into open-source because it was tired of how the public could just go
"mucking" about in their code base without reservation? What does that even
mean?

~~~
molecule
> Was there a company that got into open-source because it was tired of how
> the public could just go "mucking" about in their code base without
> reservation? What does that even mean?

Well, there's Red Hat w/ their Enterprise Linux distributions, and Apple w/
the FreeBSD-derived iOS and OSX. You can't fork and distribute either of those
products without incurring the wrath of their respective owners' very diligent
lawyers.

~~~
leohutson
Really? I have seen plenty of RHEL "forks", CentOS, Scientific Linux to name a
few.

Apple's OSX isn't open source in any sense, sure it has components based on
liberally licensed open source code, but so does almost every other
proprietary software product.

------
latj
I have seen the word "meme" enough for a while.

~~~
mheathr
It is a really useful term when used in its original context, rather than the
way the term is commonly used now.

------
trhtrsh
O'Reilly created and led a publishing empire that educated a generation of
people who created the modern Internet.

Who are these Annalee and Morozov people, and why are we wasting our time
featuring their ramblings?

