Quotes from Evgeny Morozov

When we can commit a crime, we can also trigger debate. Cases go to courts. Media start covering the cases. But once you build smart environments where, if you meet a certain probabilistic profile, you won't even be allowed to board a bus, let alone commit a crime, we're perpetuating existing laws so they face no challenges or revision.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

Information wants to eat brie.

Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.

The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.

The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively.

The message I'm trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology - they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.

It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.

We can now with Google Glasses record everything around us, and we can make sure that nothing is ever forgotten because everything is stored somewhere in Google servers or somewhere else.

There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse 'civic' and 'civil,' and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.

As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable.

The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.

However revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn't altered the basic law of human communication: Being nice to your interlocutors is a good way to start any negotiations, particularly, when being hostile is an open invitation for a cyber-fight.

When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.

Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.

I went to SXSW in 2011. God, that was awful. I mean, I only went because my publisher wanted me to promote the book and the organizers invited me and it seemed silly not to go, especially for a relatively unknown first-time author. This is just not my cup of tea; the fewer such events I do on an annual basis, the happier I feel.

Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn't.

North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others.

My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an Internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as 'the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.'

In business, standards establish the rules of the game, creating path dependencies as investments are made and corresponding designs are set in stone and plastic. Inferior standards can prevail due to smart marketing or industry collusion.

To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image.

We need to start seeing privacy as a commons - as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.

Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it's probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don't see any big political consequences out of that.