Oh gosh, weighing in on a thread about Evgeny Morozov on Liberation Tech has got to be some kind of apotheosis of trolldom... But what the heck, by now everyone who wanted to do Kill-Thread on this in their mailreader has already done so. So:
http://www.rants.org/2013/04/02/morozov_misses/ It's a reaction to Morozov's long (and IMHO wrong, though admittedly fanatically well-researched) takedown of Tim O'Reilly in The Baffler. Closing lines, for those who like to taste before they click: Tim [O'Reilly] bounces a lot of big ideas around. Anyone sincerely looking for something to criticize could find something useful to say (and in many cases Tim would appreciate it, and even change his mind). Yet when Morozov gets close to one of these things, he shies away from making an effective criticism, and instead opts to make Tim’s ideas look bad through shallow, associative analysis, without saying outright what would be a better idea. Morozov provides no constructive analysis; he wants someone to be wrong, but he doesn’t particularly care what’s right. This is just Andrew Breitbart for intellectuals. Big ideas have porous boundaries, but that isn’t the same as being meaningless. A good critic recognizes the useful big ideas, and after puncturing them helps define their boundaries better, or else counters with other ideas — puts something on the line, actually comes out and says something capable of being refuted. Morozov never takes the second steps. He plants seeds of doubt, but takes no responsibility for the crop that results. 'Nuff said. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
