CONCEPT
Solutionism
Morozov's term for the reflexive conversion of every human experience into a technical problem awaiting its fix — the ideology that depoliticizes inherently political questions by recasting them as engineering challenges.
Solutionism is the intellectual operation by which human experiences — complex, ambiguous, valuable in their resistance to simplification — are recast as problems with specifiable parameters and solution spaces, then addressed through technical interventions evaluated by metrics the redefinition itself established. Morozov introduced the concept in To Save Everything, Click Here (2013) and has extended it across the AI transition, arguing that the ideology is not merely an intellectual error but a political economy in which the ideology and the business model are structurally identical. Every experience converted into a problem becomes a market opportunity; every problem solved by a tool becomes a revenue stream.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The solutionist operation proceeds in two moves that have become invisible through familiarity. First, redefinition: an experience is recast as a problem with identifiable parameters. Second, optimization: a technical intervention is designed and evaluated against the metrics the redefinition established. The original experience — with its irreducible complexity, its dimensions that