Have you noticed how desperately Evgeny Morozov has been trying to get attention for himself, ever since Edward Snowden's big hack completely eclipsed him?
He has gotten more and more zany with his aphorisms on Twitter, and now the gloves are off, and the mask is off, and he's come clean on his technocommunism -- nore more hiding it behind a "critique of technology" as if he were just a typical university liberal or lefty -- he's become more shrill and edged now:
The Snowden Saga Heralds a Radical Shift in Capitalism
See, anybody who tells you about "radical shifts in capitalism" (!) is a Marxist of some sort -- but only recently, with his Social Democratic sort of articles for the German press, has he been fretting about evil capitalism so openly.
Of course, it's always been lurking in his writings; I recall that awful misreading he made of Vaclav Havel's story about the state store.
God knows what kind of contrived thinking led to putting this together -- we're just shy of Time Cube here.
But this is what we get:
Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly ignored all others.
But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon.
Mr Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US’s surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric – tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform – has been useless. Many foreign leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear.
When Morozov lets us know that he finds this lovely global debate just not producing enough, he shows his hand: nothing less than Marxist revolution would do.
And here he tries to square the odd circle he has created by trying to find connections to his Brezhnevism:
Here the politicians are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but thoughtful public remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he might not be fully aware of what he has uncovered. These are not isolated instances of power abuse that can be corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on spying, building more privacy tools, or making state demands to tech companies more transparent.
Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach and harvest. At the very least, such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much more disturbing trend whereby our personal information – rather than money – becomes the chief way in which we pay for services – and soon, perhaps, everyday objects – that we use?
Ah, so that's what this is about. It's realy about the Technolibertarian's technocommunism for us, where "we pretend to work" (we turn over our data and upload stuff) and "they pretend to pay us" (with a badly working and vexatious form of social media).
Morozov isn't content to discover the technocommunism right in front of us, however; he has to get more clever (the Zizek of the Internet set).
I'm all for paying for content online; Morozov isn't, and every time he needs a JSTOR article he can't access he just puts out a call for it on Twitter until somebody sends it to him who does.
From reading Morozov's past books and that really long TNR piece, I bet I know what he'd really like to see: a regime where we are given everything for free and don't pay for it with data, because....our wealth is redistributed as we make it by some central committee...
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