To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don't Exist

Description

Our world is at a crossroads. Personal gadgets are getting smarter, and technology is increasingly shaping public life too - logging everything from crime figures to how much we recycle, pollution levels to politicians' voting records. Our gadgets are getting smarter. Technology can log what we buy, customize what we consume and enable us to save and share every aspect of our existence. In the future, we're told, it will even make public life - from how we're governed to how we record crime - better. But can the digital age fix everything? Should it? By quantifying our behaviour, Evgeny Morozov argues, we are profoundly reshaping society - and risk losing the opacity and imperfection that make us human.

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion and a contributing editor for the New Republic. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, a Yahoo fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown, and a fellow at the Open Society Foundations. His monthly column on technology comes out in Slate, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and several other newspapers. He's also written for The New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the London Review of Books.

If you've ever had the niggling feeling, as you spoon down your google, that there's no such thing as a free lunch, Morozov's book will tell you how you might end up paying for it -- Brian Eno A clear voice of reason and critical thinking in the middle of today's neomania -- Nassim Taleb, author of 'The Black Swan'