Top 100 Evgeny Morozov Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Celebrating innovation for its own sake is in bad taste. For technology truly to augment reality, its designers and engineers should get a better idea of the complex practices that our reality is composed of.”

— Evgeny Morozov

52. “For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms; anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia’s mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.”

— Evgeny Morozov

53. “We need to start seeing privacy as a commons – as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.”

— Evgeny Morozov

54. “Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.”

— Evgeny Morozov

55. “A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don’t understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook.”

— Evgeny Morozov

56. “As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing.”

— Evgeny Morozov

57. “I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.”

— Evgeny Morozov

58. “Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.”

— Evgeny Morozov

59. “I have no problem with technological solutions to social problems. The key question for me is, ‘Who gets to implement them?’ and, ‘What kinds of politics of reform do technological solutions smuggle through the back door?’”

— Evgeny Morozov

60. “Would you like all of your Facebook friends to sift through your trash? A group of designers from Britain and Germany think that you might. Meet BinCam: a ‘smart’ trash bin that aims to revolutionize the recycling process.”

— Evgeny Morozov

61. “Mobile phones are one of the most insecure devices that were ever available, so they’re very easy to trace; they’re very easy to tap.”

— Evgeny Morozov

62. “We’ve never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It’s been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they’re always the enemy.”

— Evgeny Morozov

63. “If we don’t like rent control, we ought to oppose it on political and social grounds – and not just by arguing that, thanks to smartphones and social networks, we can create new, more efficient markets for matching short-term renters with tenants.”

— Evgeny Morozov

64. “Faster roads are not always safer roads – and virtually all societies, democratic or authoritarian, prefer safety over speed, even if many of their citizens enjoy fast driving.”

— Evgeny Morozov

65. “Sleephackers go to bed with sensors on their wrists and foreheads and maintain detailed electronic sleep diaries, which they often share online. To shift between sleep phases, sleephackers experiment with various diets, room and body temperatures, and kinds of pre-sleep physical exercise.”

— Evgeny Morozov

66. “There is this huge Roma problem in Europe. There are a lot of Romas who are discriminated against in countries like the Czech Republic or Hungary. They are an ethnic minority that in Europe everyone loves to hate.”

— Evgeny Morozov

67. “Dictators aren’t stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook.”

— Evgeny Morozov

68. “The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.”

— Evgeny Morozov

69. “To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image.”

— Evgeny Morozov

70. “However revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn’t altered the basic law of human communication: Being nice to your interlocutors is a good way to start any negotiations, particularly, when being hostile is an open invitation for a cyber-fight.”

— Evgeny Morozov

71. “I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.”

— Evgeny Morozov

72. “In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.”

— Evgeny Morozov

73. “For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.”

— Evgeny Morozov

74. “A faithful lifehacker would use technology to avoid dead time and move on to the entertaining, more gratifying activities as soon as possible.”

— Evgeny Morozov

75. “I don’t think love for technology itself breeds change.”

— Evgeny Morozov

76. “WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire US government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.”

— Evgeny Morozov

77. “If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public – the authorities show up and arrest everyone.”

— Evgeny Morozov

78. “Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.”

— Evgeny Morozov

79. “TED Conferences – una sorta di Woodstock dell’estenuazione intellettualistica.”

— Evgeny Morozov

80. “There is this group of people who love innovation. Those people want to innovate, and they think the Internet is a wonderful tool for innovation, which is true. But you also have to remember that much of that innovation is constrained within the realities of the foreign policy.”

— Evgeny Morozov

81. “Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google.”

— Evgeny Morozov

82. “Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.”

— Evgeny Morozov

83. “Much of the real computer talent today is concentrated in the private sector.”

— Evgeny Morozov

84. “In short, Google prefers a world where we consistently go to three restaurants to a world where our choices are impossible to predict.”

— Evgeny Morozov

85. “My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I’m not sure that we have grappled with any of them.”

— Evgeny Morozov

86. “Simply getting a country’s population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.”

— Evgeny Morozov

87. “Cybercriminals are usually driven by profit, while cyberterrorists are driven by ideology.”

— Evgeny Morozov

88. “The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.”

— Evgeny Morozov

89. “Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.”

— Evgeny Morozov

90. “North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.”

— Evgeny Morozov

91. “I’m rarely invited to start-up parties, but who cares about their trinkets and apps anyway?”

— Evgeny Morozov

92. “Information wants to eat brie.”

— Evgeny Morozov

93. “Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions.”

— Evgeny Morozov

94. “If the only hammer you are given is the Internet, it’s not surprising that every possible social and political problem is presented as an online nail.”

— Evgeny Morozov

95. “Cyberattacks have become a permanent fixture on the international scene because they have become easy and cheap to launch. Basic computer literacy and a modest budget can go a long way toward invading a country’s cyberspace.”

— Evgeny Morozov

96. “The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively.”

— Evgeny Morozov

97. “It’s true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call ‘moral panics,’ that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.”

— Evgeny Morozov

98. “You actually see liberals checking ‘Fox News,’ if only to know what the conservatives are thinking. And you’re seeing conservatives who venture into liberal sources, just to know what ‘The New York Times’ is thinking.”

— Evgeny Morozov

99. “Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.”

— Evgeny Morozov

100. “The most effective system of Internet control is not the one that has the most sophisticated and draconian system of censorship, but the one that has no need for censorship whatsoever.”

— Evgeny Morozov