The Digital Fix: Smart Machines, Dumb Humans, and the Myth of Technological Perfectionism

Resumen del libro

The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy

The dawning age of the internet has promised us a friction-free digital paradise that prizes efficiency, connectedness, and transparency on a radical scale. To internet expert and journalist Evgeny Morozov, these technological developments-touted by geeks and digerati as inherently democratic and positive- are also eroding the foundations of liberal democracy as we know it.

In Silicon Valley's new data-rich economy, services like Facebook emerge as powerful intermediaries that track our most intimate thoughts, anxieties, and aspirations-from cradle to grave-and that go on to cash in on such intimacies via targeted advertising. Yet what is good for us as consumers is not necessarily good for us as citizens. And the more connected, quantified, frictionless, and open our lives, the more easily exploitable we are by businesses, governments, and one another.

The Digital Fix demands that we reexamine how the tools, values, and potential of the internet may be transforming a liberal democratic order that depends, more than we realize it, on old-fashioned disorder.

Contributors

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, winner of Harvard's Kennedy School's 2012 Goldsmith Book Prize, and a New York Times Notable Book of 2011. He is also a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a contributing editor to the Boston Review. His articles have appeared in the Financial Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and many other publications. He writes a monthly column for Slate that is syndicated in eight other languages. He was born in Belarus.