2024 - Net critic Evgeny Morozov - The blockchain is not the solution to all problems

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Evgeny Morozov is one of the most prominent critics of digitization. Now he is working on the blockchain.

Evgeny Morozov focuses on the political and social impact of technology. In his book “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom”, the Belarusian criticized back in 2011 that the Internet does not automatically bring more freedom and democracy with it, but could also become a means of surveillance and repression in the hands of authoritarian states .

Evgeny Morozov was born in Belarus in 1984 and attended the American University in Bulgaria. He later lived in Berlin before moving to the United States. There, Morozov worked, among other things, as a visiting scholar at Stanford University and did research on the history of the Internet at Harvard University.

Morozov regularly publishes in newspapers and magazines around the world (including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Guardian and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and was voted one of the 28 most influential Europeans by news outlet Politico in 2018.

Evgeny Morozov appeared on July 5 as a speaker at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute in Rüschlikon, where SRF met him.

In 2013 he followed up with «To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism». According to Morozov, there is a belief in Silicon Valley that every social problem can be solved with technical means alone – Morozov calls this “solutionism”.

The Silicon Valley companies put the horse before the tail: Instead of analyzing exactly what the problem is and who is affected by it, they developed their solutions without considering the actual needs of those affected and then touted their apps or platforms as a panacea – knowing full well that in the end it is mainly they who benefit from it because they can collect data or otherwise earn a lot of money with their services.

Metaverse, Crypto and Co.: Empty Promises?

With his latest project «The Crypto Syllabus» Evgeny Morozov is now dealing with current technologies such as blockchain and related projects such as the Metaverse, Web3 or cryptocurrencies.

The 38-year-old says his project started at exactly the right time: at the height of the crypto bubble. He adds not quite immodestly: “I also see it as my merit that this bubble has now lost a lot of air.”

In a nutshell, the blockchain is a kind of collective accounting: Instead of just one body, one computer, controlling which data is moving back and forth in a network, all participants in the network do it together – without a leader, transparently and decentrally. The blockchain should help to break the power of large platforms such as Google or Facebook and create a new Internet – the so-called Web3, organized decentrally and managed jointly by everyone.