I think the argument is neither reasonably made nor well done. It reads like a laundry list of gripes the author has, like "oh yeah, and one more thing, and look at this word, and what a fool this guy is, and one more, and and and" but with some nice verbage.
What he doesn't get to the heart of is, aside from the fact that the book may not be very good (which I can easily accept), why the central systems-and-data-driven plank that comprises much of TED-esque thinking is bad.
To take one example, he seems to find the whole notion of a hybrid age, or the singularity, as dangerous technocratic political thinking, something to be stamped out. Whereas look at the actual smart-device search-engine semantic-social world we're creeping toward and the post-political person understands that those are just inevitable outcomes. It's not whether the singularity might happen (or could be prevented) but when, and so the forward-looking thinking person should be trying to figure out the best uses of that.
He's also missed the pointed examples of Signapore and China by a country mile, mistaking older ideological associations (which, again, every forward-thinking person understands need to be resolved) for the efficiency argument. The reviewer's point is that efficiency leads to brutality, which is a very old-school political idea, but the TED-esque view generally looks for efficiency to promote/empower humanity.
Again, like Wikipedia, both more efficient and much better (but let's instead get distracted by talking about Jimmy Wales and how he named his children).
So, you know, like that. Morozov seems to want to make a middle-20th century argument about early 21st-century ideas, and it shows. He writes passably well (though this review could have been cut in half with no loss imo), but the core conceit (this TED stuff is techno-politics) is just fundamentally wrong.
That ideas are not recent is not an argument that they are wrong, it's just an excuse to be historically illiterate yet still claim credibility.
>To take one example, he seems to find the whole notion of a hybrid age, or the singularity, as dangerous technocratic political thinking, something to be stamped out.
No, he finds the idea of a immanent techno-millennium ancient, familiar to most culturally literate people, and articulated more convincingly (or rather more coherently) by people a century ago who were also wrong. He argues that the "hybrid age" is a vacuous restating of a basic condition of man that is not only older than Twitter, but older than books. He argues that the rewarming of these old ideas masks personal agendas of the traditional sort, namely the accumulation of wealth and status by serving the traditional players in their traditional totalitarian political agendas.
You may not agree, but you also are not disagreeing coherently. At least until you can define to your audience what "semantic-social" and "post-political" mean before you use them in an argument.
There is no way we are going to agree on much in this domain. I just so strongly disagree, it is painful to me!
Consider your 'post-political person'. I believe this is a conceit. In my opinion no such person exists.
Are you seriously arguing that politicians will soon be a thing of the past? That, in essence, is the conclusion you must reach. A little further down the line, I expect the Singularity will happen as well, yet I have a sneaky suspicion the first to get there will execute the ultimate political act which will be to deny access to the several billion people that weren't part of their cohort.
-Supplemental-
Since we don't really know how the Singularity will express itself, 'get there' should be read as 'to contact', 'integrate with' etc
What he doesn't get to the heart of is, aside from the fact that the book may not be very good (which I can easily accept), why the central systems-and-data-driven plank that comprises much of TED-esque thinking is bad.
To take one example, he seems to find the whole notion of a hybrid age, or the singularity, as dangerous technocratic political thinking, something to be stamped out. Whereas look at the actual smart-device search-engine semantic-social world we're creeping toward and the post-political person understands that those are just inevitable outcomes. It's not whether the singularity might happen (or could be prevented) but when, and so the forward-looking thinking person should be trying to figure out the best uses of that.
He's also missed the pointed examples of Signapore and China by a country mile, mistaking older ideological associations (which, again, every forward-thinking person understands need to be resolved) for the efficiency argument. The reviewer's point is that efficiency leads to brutality, which is a very old-school political idea, but the TED-esque view generally looks for efficiency to promote/empower humanity.
Again, like Wikipedia, both more efficient and much better (but let's instead get distracted by talking about Jimmy Wales and how he named his children).
So, you know, like that. Morozov seems to want to make a middle-20th century argument about early 21st-century ideas, and it shows. He writes passably well (though this review could have been cut in half with no loss imo), but the core conceit (this TED stuff is techno-politics) is just fundamentally wrong.