To Save Everything, Click Here
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (PublicAffairs, 2013) is the work in which Morozov named the ideological formation he had been circling since The Net Delusion. The book dissected the Silicon Valley habit of treating every human experience as a problem awaiting its technological fix, arguing that this habit was not merely mistaken but ideologically dangerous — a framework that systematically depoliticized inherently political questions by recasting them as engineering challenges.
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The book's polemical force derives from its specificity. Morozov did not attack technology abstractly; he dismantled concrete examples of solutionist thinking across dozens of domains — from gamified health apps to smart trash cans to algorithmic dating. In each case he showed how the technical intervention, however well-intentioned, redefined the experience it addressed in ways that discarded precisely the dimensions that mattered most.
The central argument was that experiences are not problems. A problem has parameters; it can be specified, bounded, and evaluated against solution criteria. An experience has no such properties. It is irreducible, situated, and often valuable precisely in its resistance to simplification. The solutionist conversion of experience into problem is the ideological move that prepares every domain of human life for technical intervention.
The book also introduced Morozov's analysis of the political economy underlying solutionism — the structural alignment between the ideology and the business models of the companies that produce solutions. Every experience redefined as a problem becomes a market opportunity. The ideology and the economic interest are not coincidentally aligned; they are the same structure viewed from different angles.
A decade later, the book's framework has become indispensable for analyzing the AI moment. The capability expansion AI provides is real, but it operates through the same solutionist logic the book diagnosed — with a comprehensiveness and penetration that extend solutionism into the domain of cognition itself. The book's critique has aged into prophecy.
Origin
Morozov developed the book's central framework in a series of essays for The New Republic, Slate, and The New York Times in 2011–2012, sharpening the polemic through confrontations with prominent Silicon Valley figures whose thinking he treated as exemplary of the ideology he was naming.
Key Ideas
Solutionism named. The book gave mainstream discourse a word for an ideological formation that had previously operated without linguistic resistance.
Experiences versus problems. The foundational distinction on which the entire critique rests.
The ideological-economic unity. Solutionism is simultaneously a habit of mind and a business model; the two are structurally identical.
Specificity over abstraction. The book's force derives from its detailed engagement with concrete cases rather than from philosophical generalization.
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Further reading
- Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (PublicAffairs, 2013).
- Evgeny Morozov, 'Against Solutionism,' The New York Times Magazine, March 2013.
- Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (2014), on related themes of automation and human capability.
- Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues (2016), on the erosion of moral practice.