Was Nicholas Negroponte, one of the intellectual...
Was Nicholas Negroponte, one of the intellectual fathers of cyber-utopianism, correct when he predicted in 1995 that “[on the Internet] there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox”? The evidence for such sweeping claims is thin. In fact, quite the opposite may have happened.
(…) the introduction of computers into the workforce failed to produce expected productivity gains (Tetris was, perhaps, part of some secret Soviet plot to halt the capitalist economy). The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow quipped that “one can see the computer age everywhere but not in the productivity statistics!” Part of the problem in predicting the exact economic and social effects of a technology lies in the uncertainty associated with the scale on which such a technology would be used. The first automobiles were heralded as technologies that could make cities cleaner by liberating them of horse manure. The by-products of the internal combustion engine may be more palatable than manure, but given the ubiquity of automobiles in today’s world, they have solved one problem only by making another one—pollution—much worse. In other words, the future uses of a particular technology can often be described by that old adage “It’s the economy, stupid.
I’m seeing Evgeny Morozov quotes everywhere lately. I haven’t read the book but it certainly sounds quotable. However, upon closer reading most of the quotes prove to be Gladwellian sleight-of-hand making one argument (i.e. Morozov’s) seem smart by making something else look naive and stupid. Sure, Negroponte and other utopians might have overstated a point or three, but that doesn’t make Morozov’s arguments right by inference.
Does he really believe we would be more productive without computers just because it’s easy to waste time on Tetris? Saying that a car is no different than horse-and-carriage because they both pollute (true) surely overlooks quite a few aspects of car technology besides pollution?
