Evgeny Morozov Quotes

Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it's because youths don't have jobs. Or you might say that's because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks.

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.

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.

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

One possible future for WikiLeaks is to morph into a gigantic media intermediary - perhaps, even something of a clearing house for investigative reporting - where even low-level leaks would be matched with the appropriate journalists to pursue and report on them and, perhaps, even with appropriate NGOs to advocate on their causes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.

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.

When we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, 'Sex and the City,' or maybe funny videos of cats.

I'm active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle.

With the internet we are facing more or less a very similar story. It does offer virtually limitless access to entertainment and for many people living in extremely depressing conditions in authoritarian states, it does provide a vehicle for getting by. 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.

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

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?'

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.

Dictators aren't stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook.

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

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.