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The Net Delusion
Morozov's 2011 book dismantling the narrative of the internet as an inherently democratizing force — the founding demolition of <em>cyber-utopianism</em> whose structure the AI discourse is now reproducing beat for beat.
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs, 2011) appeared at the precise moment when the narrative of internet-as-liberator had achieved its greatest cultural authority — the Arab Spring was unfolding, smartphones were being credited with toppling dictators, and mainstream commentary treated Twitter and Facebook as engines of democratization. Morozov's book argued that the narrative was not merely incomplete but fatally ideological: the same technologies that enabled dissidents to organize enabled governments to surveil them, and outcomes were determined by political context rather than technological property.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central target was cyber-utopianism — the assumption that the internet possesses liberatory properties that will, over time, erode authoritarian power wherever it operates. Morozov demonstrated through detailed case studies that authoritarian regimes had become sophisticated users of the same platforms activists relied upon, deploying them for surveillance, manipulation, and the targeted identification of dissent. The technology did not determine political outcomes; the political context did.
The book also
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