Evgeny Morozov

“It is my conviction that there are alternative mechanisms of social coordination that digital technologies can facilitate.”

Writer, theorist, and historian Evgeny Morozov studies social and political implications of technology. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times among many other publications. Morozov’s award-winning debut book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs, 2011), explores the impact of the Internet on authoritarian states. His second book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (PublicAffairs, 2013), examines the effects of technology on subjects ranging from politics and criminology to weight loss. He is the founder of The Syllabus, a digital platform for discovering and distributing overlooked high-quality content. He is also a member of UNESCO’s commission on the future of higher education.

“In my own writings, I seek to bridge the gap between a close empirical study of tendencies and trends in the global economy with an effort to construct an advanced theoretical interpretation of such trends. This closer understanding of the two should, ideally, yield an intelligent agenda for how a more progressive path can be articulated.”

He is particularly interested in understanding how new digital technologies, once liberated from Big Tech, can be deployed to advance new forms of social coordination, “so that we can get beyond this binary, inherited from the Cold War, of central planning on the one hand and the price mechanism of the free-market economies on the other.”

“It is my conviction that there are alternative mechanisms of social coordination that digital technologies can facilitate.”

As a mentor, Morozov is interested in working with people who are invested in gaining “a deeper understanding of the relationship between global capitalism and digital technology—and the effects that both have on society.”

“While I’m more familiar with the world of nonfiction, I’m also be keen to work with artists, fiction writers, or filmmakers who are interested in these same issues and seek a better understanding of technocapitalism to inform their own work.”

Morozov has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, and contributing editor of and blogger for Foreign Policy magazine. His previous positions include a Yahoo! fellowship at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and a fellowship at the Open Society Institute; he was also director of new media at the NGO Transitions Online; a columnist for the Russian newspaper Akzia; and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.