The Internet Ideology
TLS May 24, 2013 from Michael Saler's review of Evgeny Morozov's To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don't exist , and Jason Lanier's Who Owns the Future? : The internet ideology provides a quasi-religious vision of how human relationships will be transformed, material abundance created, and transcendence attained through human-machine interactions. Its prophets cite its decentralized and open strucutre as the model for a free, egalitarian and transparent world order. Their holy writ is Moore's Law, which suggests that computers will "evolve" exponentially, doubling their prowess every two years or so. Their eschatology is the Singularity, which predicts that machines will outstrip humans in the near future, and benevolently uplift (or simply upload) mere mortals to nerd Nirvana. In the interim, the messy stuff of ordinary existence will be tamed by quantifying it into the bits and butes of Info...