Top 100 Evgeny Morozov Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.”

— Evgeny Morozov

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2. “Cloud computing is a great euphemism for centralization of computer services under one server.”

— Evgeny Morozov

3. “Social media’s greatest assets – anonymity, ‘virality,’ interconnectedness – are also its main weaknesses.”

— Evgeny Morozov

4. “Surveillance cameras might reduce crime – even though the evidence here is mixed – but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.”

— Evgeny Morozov

5. “Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.”

— Evgeny Morozov

6. “When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.”

— Evgeny Morozov

7. “You know, it’s not a given that there is an ‘online’ and ‘offline’ world out there. When you use the telephone, you don’t say that I’m entering some ‘telephono-sphere.’ You don’t say that, and there is no obvious need to say that when you are using a modem.”

— Evgeny Morozov

8. “Calling China’s online censorship system a ‘Great Firewall’ is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.”

— Evgeny Morozov

9. “My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an Internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as ‘the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.’”

— Evgeny Morozov

10. “I’m active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle.”

— Evgeny Morozov

11. “As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable.”

— Evgeny Morozov

12. “As befits Silicon Valley, ‘big data’ is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans – and credit histories – to millions of people who currently lack access to them.”

— Evgeny Morozov

13. “In addition to their ‘do no evil’ motto, Googlers have always been guided by another, much less explicit philosophy: ‘computational arrogance.’”

— Evgeny Morozov

14. “There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse ‘civic’ and ‘civil,’ and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.”

— Evgeny Morozov

15. “The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters.”

— Evgeny Morozov

16. “In business, standards establish the rules of the game, creating path dependencies as investments are made and corresponding designs are set in stone and plastic. Inferior standards can prevail due to smart marketing or industry collusion.”

— Evgeny Morozov

17. “The Internet can empower groups whose aims are in fact antithetical to democracy.”

— Evgeny Morozov

18. “The message I’m trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology – they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.”

— Evgeny Morozov

19. “The bigger the network, the harder it is to leave. Many users find it too daunting to start afresh on a new site, so they quietly consent to Facebook’s privacy bullying.”

— Evgeny Morozov

20. “For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.”

— Evgeny Morozov

21. “Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.”

— Evgeny Morozov

22. “A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties.”

— Evgeny Morozov

23. “In part, slacktivism is what happens when the energy of otherwise dedicated activists is wasted on approaches that are less effective than the alternatives.”

— Evgeny Morozov

24. “For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.”

— Evgeny Morozov

25. “Technological defeatism – a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there’s nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms – is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We’ll come to pay for it very dearly.”

— Evgeny Morozov

26. “I’m not on Facebook. I have a sort of anonymous account that I check, like, once every six months every time Facebook rolls out a new feature.”

— Evgeny Morozov

27. “Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn’t.”

— Evgeny Morozov

28. “I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.”

— Evgeny Morozov

29. “While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.”

— Evgeny Morozov

30. “I spent two years in Palo Alto – what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don’t care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups – and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA – which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier.”

— Evgeny Morozov

31. “Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate.”

— Evgeny Morozov

32. “There is no doubt that the Internet brims with spamming, scamming and identity fraud. Having someone wipe out your hard drive or bank account has never been easier, and the tools for committing electronic mischief on your enemies are cheap and widely accessible.”

— Evgeny Morozov

33. “I want my government to do something about my privacy – I don’t want to just do it on my own.”

— Evgeny Morozov

34. “If China’s expansion into Africa and Russia’s into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley’s ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.”

— Evgeny Morozov

35. “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.”

— Evgeny Morozov

36. “There are good reasons why we don’t want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly.”

— Evgeny Morozov

37. “Russian young people spend countless hours online downloading videos and having a very nice digital entertainment lifestyle, which does not necessarily turn them into the next Che Guevara.”

— Evgeny Morozov

38. “In reality, quitting Facebook is much more problematic than the company’s executives suggest, if only because users cannot extract all the intangible social capital they have generated on the site and export it elsewhere.”

— Evgeny Morozov

39. “You know, anyone who wears glasses, in one sense or another, is a cyborg.”

— Evgeny Morozov

40. “One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.”

— Evgeny Morozov

41. “If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it’s not really obvious where we would be. So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.”

— Evgeny Morozov

42. “In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.”

— Evgeny Morozov

43. “The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.”

— Evgeny Morozov

44. “Steve Jobs was notoriously blunt about products he found wanting, but his attack on Flash – Adobe’s popular technology for playing multimedia content inside a browser – was particularly vicious. Claiming it was buggy and insecure, Jobs banned it from the iPad.”

— Evgeny Morozov

45. “The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.”

— Evgeny Morozov

46. “My hunch is that people often affiliate with causes online for selfish and narcissistic purposes. Sometimes, it may be as simple as trying to impress their online friends, and once you have fashioned that identity, there is very little reason to actually do anything else.”

— Evgeny Morozov

47. “Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it’s probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don’t see any big political consequences out of that.”

— Evgeny Morozov

48. “This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.”

— Evgeny Morozov

49. “When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen – that’s a direct quote – it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.”

— Evgeny Morozov

50. “Google’s vision is tools that will do things for you.”

— Evgeny Morozov