Kevin Kelly Writes another dull book; Gets flayed by Evgeny Morozov

I’m about to do you a great blog service; review a review.  In the process I’ll likely parse both authors and could mislead you, but hey, it’s a blog I’m having a conversation here so shut up and keep reading,; am sure you’ve got some other important posts to get to anyway (it’s so easy to be critical).   

Someone let Kevin Kelly, the Wired Magazine wunderkind, or as he apparently calls himself “senior maverick”, release another book called “What Technology Wants.” In the March New Republic Evgeny Morozov, who abandoned the digerati to herald the dark side of techno-utopianism, delightfully thrashes said book (subscription required). 

Kelly has some odd thoughts about evolution. Drawing stolen from Goolge images (which stole it from someone else).

It seems Kelly hasn’t just been updating the ‘about me’ section of his website, but has also been grubbing around in some network theory. The nut of Kelly’s latest work is that Technology has its own wants that are not inherent in individual technologies. Morozov, who just wrote a book called “The Net delusional,”  which sounds antithetical to Kelly’s work,  gives the impression that he can explain this better then Kelly writing,

Kelly believes that “Technology” gives rise to a “network of self –reinforcing processes” and is shot through with feedback loops, and exhibits a considerable degree of autonomy that is not present on the micro-level of individual technologies.

 Someone’s been reading  Tiziana Terranova and Jodi dean (other than me?)! Anyway, Kelly feels like he needs a new word to describe technology so he makes up “the technium” which is : “the accumulation of stuff, of lore, of practices, of traditions, and of choices that allow an individual human to generate and participate in a greater number of ideas.”  Morozov explains, in so many words, that this is stupid and that words technik or technology means the same thing.

Regardless, Kelly skips along telling readers that the technium makes life’s better, longer, fuller. Kelly writes that men (sic) should learn to trust and embrace technology as it is great and bigger than us, while providing the window dressing that we should think about it and avoid erecting too many walls against its evolution.

In so many words Morozov says Kelly is wrong.

Here’s a nice quote:

He exhibits an annoying habit of identifying contrarian threads in modern physics and biology, proclaiming them to be true- unlike all those ‘orthodox’ theories dominating modern science- and then using them as unassailable building blocks for his highly speculative theories about technology…At times his theory of technology reads simply like an overheated congeries of hot new ideas that are just too maverick to fit into over disciplines.

    Movozov also has some strong feeling about the unexpressed political undercurrents in Kelly’s work. Morozov fingers Kelly as an extreme right wing, uncritical laissez faire capitalist, who is unable to define what technology is not, has too much (political) faith in it, and a fondness for the all powerful potential of more choices.  

Movozov writes:

                In some sense, Kelly’s theory suffers from the same problem that Marxist critics long ago identified in Jacques Ellul’s work on the autonomy of technology: it exonerates capitalism, and absolves powerful political and economic structures from the scrutiny they deserve.

Only while Ellul had some good things to say, Kelly was totally misguided, Kelly according to Movozov, was just trying to drum up corporate cash.

A final note, drawn out in the article is Kelly’s thrilling chapter about the Unabomber Movozov writes:

Things do not follow as Kelly thinks they do. And the situation turns really comical once Kelly’s refusal to engage with the rich literature on the philosophy and sociology of technology pushes him to conclude that the person offering the sharpest critique of technology in our time is the Unabomber. Kelly praises his writing for exhibiting ‘surprising clarity’ and dedicates a long and tedious chapter to his opinions…

No wonder Kelly has thousands of eager readers! I bet Movozov picked up a few himself off the back of Kelly’s work and this article, but that’s probably a good thing.