CONCEPT

The Solutionist Ratchet

Morozov’s name for the self-reinforcing mechanism by which solutionism expands: each successful technical solution reinforces the legitimacy of the problem-solution framework, making it slightly harder to question whether the experience that was redefined as a problem might have been valuable in its original form—and the mechanism that only turns one way.

The solutionist ratchet is Evgeny Morozov’s term for the self-amplifying dynamic at the core of solutionism: each successful technical intervention confirms the premise that problems yield to technique, each confirmation expands the domain of experience within which the problem-solution framework is applied, each expansion brings more of human life within the reach of technical optimization, and each increment of expansion makes the unconverted experiences—the ones that resist redefinition, that refuse to yield to optimization, that are valuable precisely in their recalcitrance—look increasingly anomalous, increasingly inefficient, increasingly like problems that have not yet found their solutions. The ratchet has no reverse: there is no mechanism within the framework itself for recognizing that a redefined experience was more valuable in its original form. Success always validates the redefining, because the metrics by which success is measured are the metrics the redefinition established. The cycle can only be

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