Morozov’s no joke

Just a vey few:

“The fear of appearing inauthentic, of being a fake, has propelled nearly as much technological innovation as pornography.”

“But Adorno does have a point: authentic things are not necessarily morally good, and morally good things are not necessarily authentic.”

“In this, the authenticity rhetoric of Facebook is strikingly similar to the public debates in 1950s America over whether uniformity (everyone living in mass society is essentially the same) was a greater sin than conformity (some people adopt ideas, habits, and beliefs only to get along). The latter, the conformists,were seen as phonies who chose to be someone else; the former, those who were uniform by design, were seen as the real phonies – as people who thought they were making choices and being their unique selves, when in fact they were anything but.”

Worrying about usability – the chief concern of many designers today – is like counting calories on the sinking Titanic.”

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.”
“Digital technology has greatly expanded the windows and doors of our own little rooms for self-experimentation – but we are now at a point where those rooms are on the verge of turning into glass houses.”

“Given the complexity of the self, trying to reduce the privacy concept to a purely utilitarian framework is like steamrolling a statue to capture its essence in the simpler space of the two-dimensional plane.”

Oh how many more such insights are there, to Learn. And weep. For that:

[Yes, Gettysburg battlefield. Ominously.]