O'Reilly on Morozov

The problem is that his argument doesn't really come together. He rightly makes fun of "Web 2.0" as a pointless buzzword, but that's a complaint beyond it's sell-by date. Nobody says that with a straight face anymore, except as a vague marker for a time-period of website fashion. It's not a concept anyone associates with anything of serious importance. He also makes a side-remark about '“Open,” “networks,” and “information”' that I don't really get: networks and information are mostly used in a rigorous technical sense by the tech community as far as I can tell.

His main thrust is reserved for "open", but he doesn't really make the case here either; there's a long retelling of the old free software vs. open source battle, but promoting a new, roughly descriptive term to draw a distinction between two things is hardly the stuff of Goebbels. This is apparently being extended into "Open government".

This, as far as I can tell, is the core point arrives: Morozov can put up with transparency and accountability, but extending that into "open government" that obligates government agencies to permit the public to collaborate with them is not ok. This reduces government into provider-of-services, a set of replaceable parts like the NIH or the Federal Highway Administration that either do their task or don't, and if they don't, can be changed.

This is a very sad, small box to put the government into if you've become emotionally invested in the idea of the state as the manifestation of our collective will. In this world, the "political and moral principles" of the government are of central importance and the primary goal of politics is to petition this god-state into a benevolent and not evil ruler by ensuring that it is not blind to the concerns of everyone.

This is where his point kind of falls apart, as he doesn't seem to quite distinguish the problems with the evil all-containing-god-state (Singapore, more or less) from the problems with the technocratic, apolitical, one-institution-among-many service-provider state that he claims O'Reilly is pushing for. Lumping these two opposites together makes the whole argument kind of mushy.

It's easy to apply this type of skepticism to O'Reilly media which promotes endless ideas such as 'Big Data' rebranding old technology and approaches as new, invalidating any previous concerns with data privacy and the like. I think we as an industry take the memes too seriously and with too little critical thought.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472759

1. Propaganda is now self referential. Especially that the selling point of "Government 2.0" is an analogy to "Web 2.0" and "Open," where neither "Open" nor "Web 2.0" has any kind of meaning to begin with.

2. A specific consequence of this is, that the policy debate is no longer about the goals of a policy but about manipulation of meaningless symbols.

It is then quite interesting to read O'Reilly's comments, since he actually does not refute (or even criticizes ) Morozov's points, but only asserts again that 'Open Government' is a better way to archive some policy goals.

This is of course a highly subjective and somewhat unfair compression of an interesting exchange, but functional for my main point: I completely agree both with Morozov and O'Reilly, just on different levels. Morozov does indeed raise very good questions. On the other hand, open government is an important tool to archive some policy goals, at least for some definition of open.

Okay, even after reading and re-reading that, and the paragraphs around it for context, I still want to go "wat." She needs to clarify there was no such term as "Open Source", not no such idea.

Props to Tim O'Reilly for discussing what is basically a hit piece with good humor.

He also seems to be polarizing on purpose:

Can Twitter build a button so that users can indicate how offensive my tweets are? I'd really love that: like "Favorites" - perhaps "Hates"?

Because, at least on this end, there's some anxiety that my tweets are not offensive enough.

https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov/status/319107461250424832

Really? What regimes have murdered in the name of openness? And let's not mistake what regimes claim to do with what they actually do. China's Great Leap Forward waved equality as a banner, yet I don't see the resulting horrific famine as being a reason to roll back civic rights in America

Edit:

I read this passage a couple but cannot figure out what it means -- the OP is describing how open source arose from the free software movement:

> The problem was that companies could sell free software, but they weren't always happy about the public mucking around in their code and changing it. So O'Reilly helped a group of entrepreneurs come up with the alternative term "open source" software, which described a bunch of different licenses that people could use to release software in ways that free software would not allow. You might say that open source allowed companies to release code that was partly open, but partly closed.

O'Reilly already weighed in pretty effectively...but the OP must be referring to something that happened in reality...right? Was there a company that got into open-source because it was tired of how the public could just go "mucking" about in their code base without reservation? What does that even mean?

Who are these Annalee and Morozov people, and why are we wasting our time featuring their ramblings?