I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent.
Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth.
Always worth reading.
This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" and "free software".
I had no idea Tim O'Reilly actively barred Stallman from his early conferences, which crucially helped create the competing open source community.
Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
I first found the tone of the article harsh and unjustified, and stopped reading after the second section.
I don't think I've read Morozov before, so after reading your comments, I dove back in for a second take.
I agree that it is an impressively concise and clear history of free vs open source - that alone made the article worthwhile, I think.
Regarding HN readers dumping on him:
> Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression—the religious fervor that many users feel about the Internet has helped catalyze a lot of activist campaigns—but, by and large, the concept also blunted our analytical ability to balance rights against each other.
This is spot-on, and is especially poignant when applied to sites such as Reddit, where users championing "Internet Freedom" occasionally eschew morality in order to create an ethical martyr for their cause - see the case of the 'jailbait' subreddit. I have no doubt that those users and similarly minded users who browse HN would find the above insulting.
He makes other insights throughout the article that would apply to similarly ardent groups of users that are around the HN-sphere.
I sort of understand the value people see in Morozov as a counterweight to tech's occasional fatuousness, but this wasn't a good article. As someone who is morally (if not intellectually) coming from a similar place as him, I found myself getting progressively more and more unhappy with the article the farther I got; it became a caricature of a point that deserves to be made more carefully.
I thought it was ok, and I don't actually usually like Morozov much. But I think it was confusing in being nominally about O'Reilly. The bulk of the article is only tangentially about O'Reilly, and is more along the lines of a reprise of Richard Stallman's essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", but for a non-tech audience who probably wouldn't read Stallman (he does at least cite/credit that Stallman piece, though he paraphrases it in more words than the actual original piece). O'Reilly seems to get grafted on because he organized some conferences and promoted the term among businesspeople, and is taken to be emblematic of a certain kind of Valley culture.
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
A writer who can't seem to get to the point because he needs more paragraphs to showcase additional literary allusions is not going to hold me hostage indefinitely. If the first two thousand words of an essay are not a sufficiently representative sample on which to base conclusions about the essay, then the writer is not a good writer. He may of course reveal the cure for cancer in the final paragraph, but given the opportunity cost of missing out on more important things I could be reading, I'm willing to take the risk.
I discovered long ago that "intellectual" did not mean "intelligent"; it was about style of presentation, not importance of ideas. You be the judge of whether that is a symptom of intellectual decline.
>Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).
Or he is just in love with the allusions. A good essay should not require independent research to figure out an allusion-it should be evident in the essay itself.
The article just doesn't have any sort of flow. It feels like Morozov had a pile of things he wanted to talk about, references he wanted to include, and points he wanted to attempt to make, but wasn't able to(or didn't bother to) make a coherent narrative out of the entire thing. The end result is that it feels disjointed and is very hard to read.
The 13th paragraph starts talking about O'Reilly's origin. But why is it there? The closest reference to his origin is in the 5th paragraph. The next 8 paragraphs are spent jumping all over the last 15 or so years.
Another example is the reference to Neil Postman. The two paragraphs dedicated to him is absolutely worthless, as Postman is used to refer to Alfred Korzybski, who Morozov then related to O'Reilley. There isn't any reason for Postman to be in there other than to have the reference. There is no link to O'Reilly, aside from a throwaway sentence referring to Postman's work 31 paragraphs(and 2 sections) after the last Postman reference.
The Neil Postman reference is to establish the distinction between stupid talk (i.e. statements which are demonstrably false) and crazy talk (i.e. statements which rely on such a different semantic frame that they are meaningless except in that frame.) This distinction comes up throughout the entire essay, most prominently in the title.
No essay can really be understood in a vaccuum. There's always some manner of background information which has to be absorbed in order to understand its gist, even if that background information is just a rudimentary grasp of the language used to write it. The purpose of Morozov's allusions is not to just allude, but rather to give explicit links to concepts he's drawing on. In the Postman case, Morozov wishes to use the distinction Postman drew up, but without spending too long reiterating it (and thus cluttering up an already cluttered essay) he describes it briefly, notes the source, and then figures that if you want to understand the distinction more thoroughly, you can look up the original.
I can't argue that it's a bit overwrought and thick—at the very least, I concur it needed some manner of chapter headings or other structure—but Morozov is most certainly not alluding for the sake of alluding.
So I've just looked up Morozov's book and then realized I could get it at.. Safari Books Online (an O'Reilly Media venture.) Oh the irony. Still, it's free. Free as in I already pay for the subscription.
Oh please, Morozov's appeal lies almost exclusively in his ability to teardown strawmen of his own creation ("oh look, some stupid startup thinks it can save the whales, isn't Silicon Valley so stupid?") or inciting fear over technological advances by citing obscure studies and anecdotes. He's like an Ann Coulter sans brevity.
This is a disappointing criticism of someone who presents some very interesting ideas. Morozov is definitely guilty of tearing down some absurd strawmen, but that doesn't invalidate his criticisms of, say, SV's "solutionist" culture.
Comments
Stylish and smooth-talking are the last words I'd use to describe Tim. Whereas they do fairly accurately describe the tone of this article.
I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent.
Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth. Always worth reading.
This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" and "free software".
I had no idea Tim O'Reilly actively barred Stallman from his early conferences, which crucially helped create the competing open source community.
Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
I first found the tone of the article harsh and unjustified, and stopped reading after the second section.
I don't think I've read Morozov before, so after reading your comments, I dove back in for a second take.
I agree that it is an impressively concise and clear history of free vs open source - that alone made the article worthwhile, I think.
Regarding HN readers dumping on him:
> Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression—the religious fervor that many users feel about the Internet has helped catalyze a lot of activist campaigns—but, by and large, the concept also blunted our analytical ability to balance rights against each other.
This is spot-on, and is especially poignant when applied to sites such as Reddit, where users championing "Internet Freedom" occasionally eschew morality in order to create an ethical martyr for their cause - see the case of the 'jailbait' subreddit. I have no doubt that those users and similarly minded users who browse HN would find the above insulting.
He makes other insights throughout the article that would apply to similarly ardent groups of users that are around the HN-sphere.
I sort of understand the value people see in Morozov as a counterweight to tech's occasional fatuousness, but this wasn't a good article. As someone who is morally (if not intellectually) coming from a similar place as him, I found myself getting progressively more and more unhappy with the article the farther I got; it became a caricature of a point that deserves to be made more carefully.
I thought it was ok, and I don't actually usually like Morozov much. But I think it was confusing in being nominally about O'Reilly. The bulk of the article is only tangentially about O'Reilly, and is more along the lines of a reprise of Richard Stallman's essay "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", but for a non-tech audience who probably wouldn't read Stallman (he does at least cite/credit that Stallman piece, though he paraphrases it in more words than the actual original piece). O'Reilly seems to get grafted on because he organized some conferences and promoted the term among businesspeople, and is taken to be emblematic of a certain kind of Valley culture.
HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
A writer who can't seem to get to the point because he needs more paragraphs to showcase additional literary allusions is not going to hold me hostage indefinitely. If the first two thousand words of an essay are not a sufficiently representative sample on which to base conclusions about the essay, then the writer is not a good writer. He may of course reveal the cure for cancer in the final paragraph, but given the opportunity cost of missing out on more important things I could be reading, I'm willing to take the risk.
I discovered long ago that "intellectual" did not mean "intelligent"; it was about style of presentation, not importance of ideas. You be the judge of whether that is a symptom of intellectual decline.
>Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).
Or he is just in love with the allusions. A good essay should not require independent research to figure out an allusion-it should be evident in the essay itself.
The article just doesn't have any sort of flow. It feels like Morozov had a pile of things he wanted to talk about, references he wanted to include, and points he wanted to attempt to make, but wasn't able to(or didn't bother to) make a coherent narrative out of the entire thing. The end result is that it feels disjointed and is very hard to read.
The 13th paragraph starts talking about O'Reilly's origin. But why is it there? The closest reference to his origin is in the 5th paragraph. The next 8 paragraphs are spent jumping all over the last 15 or so years.
Another example is the reference to Neil Postman. The two paragraphs dedicated to him is absolutely worthless, as Postman is used to refer to Alfred Korzybski, who Morozov then related to O'Reilley. There isn't any reason for Postman to be in there other than to have the reference. There is no link to O'Reilly, aside from a throwaway sentence referring to Postman's work 31 paragraphs(and 2 sections) after the last Postman reference.
The Neil Postman reference is to establish the distinction between stupid talk (i.e. statements which are demonstrably false) and crazy talk (i.e. statements which rely on such a different semantic frame that they are meaningless except in that frame.) This distinction comes up throughout the entire essay, most prominently in the title.
No essay can really be understood in a vaccuum. There's always some manner of background information which has to be absorbed in order to understand its gist, even if that background information is just a rudimentary grasp of the language used to write it. The purpose of Morozov's allusions is not to just allude, but rather to give explicit links to concepts he's drawing on. In the Postman case, Morozov wishes to use the distinction Postman drew up, but without spending too long reiterating it (and thus cluttering up an already cluttered essay) he describes it briefly, notes the source, and then figures that if you want to understand the distinction more thoroughly, you can look up the original.
I can't argue that it's a bit overwrought and thick—at the very least, I concur it needed some manner of chapter headings or other structure—but Morozov is most certainly not alluding for the sake of alluding.
So I've just looked up Morozov's book and then realized I could get it at.. Safari Books Online (an O'Reilly Media venture.) Oh the irony. Still, it's free. Free as in I already pay for the subscription.
Oh please, Morozov's appeal lies almost exclusively in his ability to teardown strawmen of his own creation ("oh look, some stupid startup thinks it can save the whales, isn't Silicon Valley so stupid?") or inciting fear over technological advances by citing obscure studies and anecdotes. He's like an Ann Coulter sans brevity.
This is a disappointing criticism of someone who presents some very interesting ideas. Morozov is definitely guilty of tearing down some absurd strawmen, but that doesn't invalidate his criticisms of, say, SV's "solutionist" culture.
His style might not invalidate the criticisms, but it can certainly obscure and blunt them.