And speaking of neo-liberalism, before I forget, here's Evgeny Morozov in the German press again (I bet he will move to Germany before long).
Remember Evgeny Morozov? Before Snowden, he was everywhere, remember? Then he was laughed at for locking up his Internet router along with the screwdriver in a box to limit distractions while he Thought Big Thoughts and worked on his PhD and his next book. He keeps up a steady Twitter stream, but he doesn't seem to be discussed as much as he was. He had that perfectly hateful piece in Der Spiegel, and now this:
However, acknowledging that a world saturated with modern technologies is not automatically hostile to progressive and democratic ideals should not blind us to the fact that, due to the present historical situation, we are ill-equipped to unlock their emancipatory potential. In fact, the opposite is true: as long as the global political and economic regime is characterized by the dismantlement of the welfare state, the decline of the very idea of public goods, the triumph of tinkering over structural reform, the victory of psychology over philosophy as the favorite discipline of our technocratic classes, we shouldn't expect technology to perform much of an emancipatory function.
So, what is it that we – and by “we” I mean progressive critics who have little patience for the romanticism and conservatism of technology-bashers – talk about when we talk about technology? Certainly, it's not the dialectics of innovation, progress, or enlightenment, as Silicon Valley would prefer to have it. No, for the true and democratically minded critic, “technology” is just a slick, depoliticized euphemism for the neoliberal regime itself. To attack technology today is not to attack the Enlightenment – no, it is to attack neoliberalism itself.
Oh, dear.
It really is a very stark revelation of what his real beliefs are. Finally after all that complicated erudite talk about the techno-utopians and all his complicated jokes in French, he comes clean and just explains that he opposes neo-liberalism. You know, normal capitalism.
Whenever I hear someone use that term, I know they have had a Marxist professor or two in their life or somehow imbibed the socialist view of the world. It's always said with a knowing sneer, as if the speaker is far above the grubby capitalist system being described, and can "call out" the "real nature" of this "rent-seeking" sort of economy blah blah.
I explained back here in the discussion of AirBnB how these new social sharing businesses are really about collectivizing property.
I wonder what Tom Slee and David Golumbia, Canadians who tend toward social democracy as their worldview, think of Evgeny's more candid statement now.
I think it's full of crap.
Take this completely ridiculous, nonsensical description of where Evgeny thinks health is going, due to appification:
Under this new regime, our smartphones enable us to track our health – along with our sleeping, eating, and exercising patterns. The apps can tell us how to fix ourselves better than most doctors. But the social costs of such an approach, while still invisible, are not trivial : the app-ification of problem solving reduces health from a political and public issue – a project where clashing visions for improving the world have to compete for endorsement by engaged citizens – to a purely privatized project, where citizens morph into anonymous participants in the marketplace, invited to fix their bodies on their own terms and with their own resources.
Has Evgeny been in a hospital lately? Unfortunately, with my son's accident, I spent the last months constantly in the hospital day and night, and got to see a lot of hospitals and a lot of public health.
We don't have insurance, and it's been a nightmare, but not as much of one as we are led to believe. To be sure, I've had to raise money to pay for private physical therapy (think Hank in "Breaking Bad"!) So hit the tip jar on this page if you'd like to help! But there are also a lot of things that eventually Medicaid and MetroPlus will help with -- and not even ObamaCare, which wasn't in effect.
And public health, for all its big faults, works, more or less, and we should be grateful for it especially in big cities (if my son's crash had happened in a little town in New York State, let alone in some foreign country, he'd be dead or severely disabled now.)
Just because people like me criticize socialism or criticize ObamaCare doesn't mean we somehow oppose public health like Randians or something. There can be a balance. There can be less punitive policies (the taxation) and more spending cuts. I could say a great deal about this from personal experience -- but Evgeny is not speaking from that.
Health care isn't appified -- doctors struggle with desk top computers, not even i-Pads, in most settings. Even where it is appified, it doesn't work, it stalls, they get frustrated. (And I wish I could catch my app "Map My Walk" in the act of what it often does as I'm out walking and recording my miles -- pitching me a McDonald's ad lol.)
And even if people become more involved in individualized health tracking, they still need a public health care system -- and guess what, they have one. Nothing like the scary scenario Morozov depicts is close to happening (and by the way, Lanier also depicts in reverse, more optimistically, with nanobots coming to operate on you if you have a casino coupon). Not only does Sergei Brin manage his Parkinson's with real doctors in real hospitals, not apps, despite all the protests, the ObamaCare program was passed in Congress. Some dystopia with every man for himself, eh?
P.S. Enormous amounts of idiocy about "neoliberalism" is written in the world (see below!)
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