Delusions Aside, the Net's Potential Is Real

Evgeny Morozov's new book, The Net Delusion, is an important contribution; its publication has been widely welcomed as an important correction to cyber-utopianism, and greeted with laudatory reviews. I found myself agreeing with the majority of its arguments.

But I write here neither to praise nor bury the book, but to engage it critically. Morozov challenges the intellectual laziness that characterizes so many analyses of the Internet's impact, which do tend to be on the utopian side. That is well, but just as cyber-utopianism is fashionable in some circles, it's equally fashionable in others to pooh-pooh the fundamentally transformative impact of the Internet, denying it any great world-historical importance. To some intellectuals, the mundanity of human sociality exposed through the Internet deserves to be mocked, and people's sincere attempts to express their identity and convictions through online methods are derided as meaningless "slactivism."