"Keep up the criticism!"
Yes, that's what Evgeny Morozov wrote to me in 2011 at an event during Social Media Week in New York City, not because he enjoys my criticism -- of him. He just wrote that to make it seem as if he didn't care about such criticism and would be charitable enough about it to someone willing to spend a day's grocery money on his book.
In fact, I'd sparred with him before that date a number of times, despite originally enjoying his piece on the FSB outsourcing hate in Russia in the comments sections.
Why? Because among many other things, I saw what an opportunist he was. It's okay to be an opportunist. This is America! Opportune all you like! But I found it rather, well, facile the way his views went from NGO-ish, when he worked for Transitions Online, then turned to exposing the FSB when he was a Soros fellow, then blasting certain excessive Internet guru types while a Yahoo fellow and at the Berkman Center, then the whole Silicon Valley thing while at Stanford -- interposed with periodic blasts on the State Department and their Internet freedom program. He's at New American Foundation today in the heart of the Soros-funded "progressives" -- there isn't a soul around Morozov, critic or supporter, who will ever care that he endorsed Angela Davis. That's the problem.
I write this as my daughter reads aloud in frustration her homework assignment for tonight (I'm not kidding): write a Marxist critique of Jane Eyre. Yes, I'm not kidding. There's even a little capsule summary of what Marxism is. Marxism is, according to the New York City School District's handout today, the following:
The Revolution
The continuing conflict between the classes will lead to upheaval and revolution by oppressed peoples and form the groundwork for a new order of society and economics where capitalism is abolished. According to Marx, the revolution will be led by the working class (others think peasants will lead the uprising) under the guidance of intellectuals. Once the elite and middle class are overthrown, the intellectuals will compose an equal society where everyone owns everything (socialism - not to be confused with Soviet or Maoist Communism).
Mkay, we'll be sure not to do that! And next week's assignment -- and again, I'm not making this up: critique Jane Eyre from the perspective of a "third-wave feminist". In case you don't know what that is, here's the handy tip-sheet: "early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist (over generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of second wave feminism, third wave feminism borrows from post-structural and contemporary gender and race theories to expand on marginalized populations' experiences."
See, this is why I bother with this stuff -- look at the kind of minds we will get coming to college -- where even worse awaits them.
But to get back to Morozov -- he didn't like my criticism, but when he happened to meet me after his presentation at the Soros Foundation, when I still worked at EurasiaNet, he saw that I was in the milieu of people that he couldn't really dis so outrageously. So he pulled back. He tucked in his claws -- for then. The minute I announced a year after that or so that I had left the Soros realm, then he went back to making nasty -- nastier -- comments.
BTW, note this: his entry is yet another Wikipedia entry that is much shorter than mine, barely perceptively critical although he is very controversial, and contains hardly anything on his publications and articles -- even though the person is genuinely famous, has books commercially published, he has has academic positions, etc. which I have never had. Why? Every blog post that some griefer didn't like is given direct quotes and links and tendentious assessment on my entry, and he gets nothing of that treatment.
But yes, I give Morozov his due -- he has accomplished a tremendous amount since he left that god-awful irradiated shithole of Belarus run by Lukashenka a wacky Soviet-style tyrant -- who cancelled the Soviet holiday International Women's Day only because it conflicted with his proclaimed day of mourning for Chavez, one of his biggest financial and political supporters.
I wouldn't ever expect anyone to stay in Belarus -- I tell any of my friends or colleagues there to get out if they can, it's a hideous, awful place in so many respects and not easy to change with both Russia and the EU dedicated to pretty much keeping it the way it is.
But Morozov just never criticizes Belarus -- at all. Maybe he thinks it's self-evident. Maybe he is a jaded, hipster youth hating on all authority. Now, if he has relatives back there, I wouldn't ask him to do that, either. But then he goes out of his way to be nasty. He makes cracks, like saying that the Belarus democracy movement's hashtags are "trending only in DC" as if they are only of interest to politicians wanting to make hay of them, or as if revolutions are only paid for by the US government or something. Sure, the US criticizes Belarus because it can, it's a little country it doesn't depend on, like Russia or Uzbekistan, where it is more circumspect about its criticism because it depends on them now for the exit from Afghanistan.
Yet the intelligentsia of Belarus are among the bravest people I know. While Zhenya was tweeting snottily to me that he was "30 km. from the action" during the big democracy demonstration in Minsk in 2010 (he was home for the holidays in his provincial town or somewhere else in Europe), other people, including the independent presidential candidates, were getting their asses kicked and being beaten and thrown into jail for years, some of them still there. I don't require bravery. I don't require somebody joins every dissident movement. But I think the moral thing to do if you have left a situation where other people are still fighting the good fight is to have a bit of humility. To not shit on them, at the very least, you know?
The number of people who track Morozov on what he says about Belarus and its opposition movements is likely: 1. I realize that. Who cares, in the larger world? But it tells you what you need to know about his character, and that matters. I want to understand what I'm getting in a society when somebody critiques Big IT or the Internet utopian fallacies, which I also critique.
And what I don't want in that society is communism, particularly of the violent, radical Black Panther sort of Angela Davis.
Yes, that Angela Davis is the one Morozov has praised first in his New York Times opinion essay on Internet movements, then later in his book.
And that forms the basis for this Twit fight, recorded here on Storify. Enjoy! [Except -- Storify is no more, it's gone, along with all its files, unless you happened to save them -- and I only managed some, not all. Fortunately, as they say, "the Internet never forgets," and here it is on the Wayback Machine. Read the original essay in NYT as well.
Whimsley has a review up -- I'm not among the privileged to get a free book to review, so I will have to buy it in the remainder bin at the Strand one of these days.
Recent Comments