Alan Jacobs

I wish that I could be as charitable as you are and say that Morozov is raising good questions. He could be, but he works so hard to make dialogue impossible that he actually impairs discussion of the questions he purports to raise. And his misrepresentations, accepted by those who don’t know much about the topic, do harm the work of people who happen to fall in the crosshairs.

It would be terrific if Morozov were saying that there are people co-opting the idea of open government, or web 2.0, or open source, or whatever, and rendering these terms less useful, pointing back to their original impulse and real meaning, but instead, he uses the presence of pretenders to deny that there was ever any merit to the movement in the first place.

I find it rather sad that the kind of attack media that has degraded our politics is now being unleashed on the technology world. We’ve now got our own Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. I don’t think public discourse about important topics is improved by any of these figures. Polarization is their game.