Morozov’s essay eviscerates O’Reilly’s career in order to out him as a fake progressive who confuses entrepreneurialism with political freedom. In this story, O’Reilly is the indie rocker who sold out — or maybe the hipster marketer who induced other indie rockers to sell out. Either way, O’Reilly’s foundational crime is taking something radical and transformative like free software and mainstreaming it by making it palatable to entrepreneurs and consumers. And this is the kind of mainstreaming that also turns participatory, responsible governments into pathetic tools of crony capitalism and (in a worst-case scenario) privatized military forces.As I said, the essay must be read as an allegory about a set of memes, not as a profile of a man. But Morozov is correct to identify a disturbing slipperiness at the core of the “open government” meme. It sounds like freedom but is really just another way of turning you into a passive data point, easily mined by the highest bidder.