CONCEPT
Experiences Are Not Problems
The load-bearing wall of Morozov's entire intellectual edifice — the distinction solutionism exists to erase and the AI moment has made simultaneously more important and more difficult to maintain.
Morozov's foundational distinction holds that experiences and problems belong to different categories of reality. A problem has parameters: it can be specified, bounded, decomposed into components, and evaluated against criteria that establish when it has been solved. An experience has no such properties. It is irreducible, situated, temporally extended, and valuable in ways that resist quantification — sometimes valuable precisely because it resists quantification, because the dimensions that matter most are the ones no metric can capture.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The solutionist conversion of experience into problem is not merely an intellectual error. It is a political operation with material consequences. Every experience successfully redefined as a problem becomes a market opportunity. Every problem solved by a tool becomes a revenue stream. The ideology and the business model are structurally identical, and the ideological conversion is the precondition for the economic extraction.
Consider grief. A person has lost someone she loved. Grief is not a problem to