[danso]

Oh boy, another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov, following the tried and true formula of:

1. Pick topic close to the heart of techies 2. Deride the worst/most fanatical examples of said topic in practice 3. Make non-techies feel safe and smug that techie people are just mindless electric sheep

Because the idea that there's a way to streamline your life's mundane tasks so that you can do something other than watch cat videos is just beyond imagination. Nope, people obsessed with efficency are automatons who would only use that free time to just work harder and/or view cat videos.

This essay is even more nonsensical than his usual. It's like he ran out of wild anecdotes abo life hacking and had to find other words to which "hacking" has been appended.

[lvs]

I think it's wrong to bifurcate the audience into technie and non-techie, as if the only people who don't buy into personal optimizer narcissism are decidedly untechnical. You live in a little bubble if you think that's the case.

[danso]

No doubt. Don't get me wrong, there's obviously excesses when it comes to life hacking, or entrepernurialism, or anything, and it's fine to pushback with reasoned arguments. However, IMO, Morozov's contrarianism leaves little room for a healthy spectrum, and devolves quickly into "look at those tech freaks!"

[vixus]

The majority of people I know who are into aggressively and efficiently managing their time are definitively 'non-techies'.

[VLM]

Its older and in some ways a simpler tried and true formula of "Hey, did you know Americans are the pinnacle of psychological reactance?"

Better known as reverse psychology. No nation of people on the planet are better at it than the Americans. Free them from the merger of .gov and religion and they'll demand a re-merger and join whacko cults. Free them economically and they'll become slaves of mortgage banks. Free them in the workforce and most of them will idolize being corporate drones. (nearly) free national parks and they'll watch sitcoms on TV instead. Pay off debts means go shopping so you're poor again. Lose some weight results in go pig out. You get the idea. You can write a billion of these stories about Americans. Self destruction is the national psyche. Its a pretty boring story once you get the pattern, although its funny to watch from the outside if you've checked out of it.

In this particular case its merely a "news" story that freeing people from some drudgework means American drones will of course true to their nature logically bury themselves in more drudgework than ever LOL. At least the dumb ones will, anyway. I could have told you the outcome, and even probably lines from the "news" story, as soon as I heard what the movement proposed to do.

[zalew]

> another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov

HN - where skepticism is allowed and ecouraged only as long as it doesn't touch the sacred technocrat dogmas.

[blatherer]

skepticism is fine. the problem is that morozov has a long history of tiresome and low content journalistic trolling.

[zalew]

I know Morozov's writing and agree with him more often than not. not sure why you call it trolling, it's for sure more substance than the usual hn blog post ping-pong. Last time I saw an essay of him around here, most comments here were about it being too long.

[danso]

You must be talking about this thread, relating to his attack of Tim O'Reilly as a "Meme Hustler"

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

Well, I'll leave it to people to decide if the top commenter, potatolicious, was right in dismissing Morozov's piece as being too long. Frankly, that's the nicest thing you can say about Morozov's takedown, which confuses "length" with "substance", unfortunately.

This was O'Reilly's response, FWIW: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TimOReilly/posts/Q8EqCQJstBE

[zalew]

I have read his book aside of his many essays, so I can agree his style is lengthy - that's actually the only issue I may have. That doesn't change the fact that his arguments are well-thought and usually supported by references. You don't have to agree with him or like his style, but bringing it down to a 'TLDR' is silly, his writing has more substance than the usual blogosphere content posted around and it's worth taking those few minutes of overhead (instead of scrolling some blabbering on twitter f.ex.).

[gruseom]

I'm not a fan of Morozov either, but this piece is not worse than his usual. First, it's a review of two books by other people. Second, the examples he picks are not extreme, they're rather typical. Third, his critique in this case is, in my opinion, pretty sound.