[SIGCIS-Members] Evgeny Morozov: Author of the Quixote?

Evgeny Morozov: Author of the Quixote? Dear Cabalists, I have called you this evening to this secret cavern deep underground to address an important matter. I’ve been looking closely at the explanation Evgeny Morozov posted on Tumblr to describe the creation of his controversial New Yorker piece “The Planning Machine.” And you know what? We misunderestimated the guy. In fact he is even more brilliant than he says he is. Also more modest. Hard to believe, but I think I can convince you on this one. Now I know that, when the article first appeared, some in the SIGCIS community were concerned that Morozov might not have given quite enough credit to Eden Medina’s award winning 2011 book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Pedants noted that the article spent about twenty paragraphs on the story of the Chilean Cybersyn network project of the 1970s, closely recapping Medina’s argument and evidence. They observed that he mentioned her book only once, as the source of one specific insight. Ugly words like “erasure” were bandied around. Morozov was even accused of committing some kind of obscure academic misdemeanor. Plagism, maybe. Being a Phalangist? I forget the exact word. Some jealous cynics unfairly tarred the prolific and famous critic turned Harvard Ph.D. student as the James Franco of the history of science. If you look closely enough at http://evgenymorozov.tumblr.com/post/99479690995/some-notes-on-my-cybernetic -socialism-essay you will see that everything is resolved. Here’s what happened. Morozov set out to write a review essay focused on Medina’s book. So far, so humdrum. Any mediocrity can write a review essay. Then the magic happened. Morozov went to the library and pulled a bunch of the books Medina had cited. Some of them were very hard to read, but that didn’t faze him. He read even more books. He “pushed in many directions at once.” He followed in Medina’s footsteps to read Beer’s papers in Liverpool, to correspond with Beer’s former colleagues, and to interview Fernando Flores who initiated Project Cybersyn with an invitation to British cyberneticist Stafford Beer. He even found out some things about Beer and Cybersyn that Medina hadn’t mentioned in the book. At the end of “six months of very hard work” Morozov had produced his own comprehensive history of managerial cybernetics, with Beer and Project Cybersyn as its main focus. A lot of review essays say more about an imaginary book that the critic would write than about the actual text under discussion. Morozov did something unique and different: he actually spent the time to recreate and transcend Medina’s entire research from the same original sources. So his final New Yorker piece didn’t deny anything due to Medina. She was properly credited in the one paragraph that still relied on her work. In the rest of the article Morozov was summarizing his own groundbreaking research. Unfortunately the space requirements of the New Yorker prevented him from ever writing down the longer, footnoted version of this seminal contribution, let along publishing it in a peer reviewed journal or with an academic press. It exists in his head and that’s good enough for me. With just 4,000 words at his disposal in the New Yorker Morozov was generous to spend two of them evaluating Medina’s work in passing as an “entertaining history.” Two words might not sound like much, but The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (revised edition) summed up Earth and everyone on it as “mostly harmless.” Heck, I’ve seen posters for really bad movies that blew up fainter and shorter praise in huge letters (“Energetic!” Some guy you’ve never heard of – Huffington Post). Despite this clear signposting in the tenth paragraph some dimwits did not grasp that the piece was a book review. With what little respect might be due to them, this is clear their fault, not his. He simply did not have enough space “to repeat what was already obvious.” Let me observe in passing that Morozov is wasting his new piece on Tumblr. With a little editing it too could be published in the New Yorker. I suggest the “Shouts & Murmurs” section. I have particular sympathy for Morozov as a glance at his Twitter feed over the past month shows that he is beset with idiots on all sides. People with paralyzed brains in startups. Events “about bullshit.” The silliness of Marshal McLuhan. The “stupidity” of Checky. The dullards who retweet him without recognizing his sarcasm. Bravest of all, a tweet observing “Got nothing to say? Add the word ‘ontology’ to it – at least, it will get published.” Perhaps he had, at that very moment in his research, come across Peter Galison’s classic paper “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Weiner and the Cybernetic Vision.” His books tell a similarly moving story. As the only person in the world who is both intelligent and principled he puts a succession of idiots, hacks, and corporate shills to shame. It’s the lot of the genius to be unappreciated in his own lifetime. His plight is captured eloquently by his twitter tagline, “There are useful idiots. Look around.” Let’s do that right now. All of you line up. Look left. Look right. One of you is an idiot. Probably that guy on your left. I think he’s drooling, but it’s hard to tell with the light down here. The woman on the right doesn’t look too sharp either. Chances are that they’re both idiots. Hell, I wouldn’t be shocked if all three of you are idiots. Some of you don’t even go to Harvard. So, implausible as this might seem, here’s why I think Morozov is being unduly modest about his own immense potential. Over the past six months I’ve been conducting my own unpublished, unwritten, research project on a little known figure of the early twentieth century: Pierre Menard. Menard is remembered a prolific yet minor scholar, author of five monographs and a number of articles on a range of topics. Like Morozov he spread his talent widely. Yet Menard’s true, and little acknowledged, genius lay in an entirely separate project. He was attempting a supremely audacious literary feat: reproducing Don Quixote without, and here comes the hard part, having read it since early childhood. He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. By the time of his death years of meticulous research had allowed Menard to independently reproduce significant portions of the text. He was one of the forgotten greats of world literature. Menard’s challenge was more formidable that Cervantes’, just as Morozov faced a more difficult task than Medina. As Menard wrote, “To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself.” Looking side by side at identical passages from Menard and Cervantes it is clear that Menard’s was the greater accomplishment. To write in an alien tongue, three centuries later and still produce the same words was a remarkable and subtle triumph. Since Menard’s death none have dared to take up this challenge, but given his remarkable talent as a replicator of research I think Morozov might be able to finish the job. There are other parallels. Menard was drawn to Don Quixote as “an entertaining book.” Morozov’s research began with Medina’s “entertaining history.” Both authors transcended their sources by reproducing them. They also share working methods. Menard spent sleepless nights scribbling thousands of draft pages, which he meticulously destroyed. As he noted, “the philosophers publish the intermediary stages of their labor in pleasant volumes and I have resolved to do away with those stages.” Only the brilliant end product remains. Morozov tweeted to an admirer that his method was “old school: most of is (sic) in my head and occasional notes in Open Office. I am blessed with good memory.” Morozov’s ability to repeat interviews with Medina’s oral history subjects to reproduce the same quotes she used in her book is the surest sign of his readiness for this awesome challenge. Morozov mentions interviewing Flores and Brian Eno, but again his modesty is deceptive. I’m sure that he also interviewed Ángel Parra (quote p. 133) and Tomas Kohn (quote p. 132) to independently reproduce the remarks from their 2008 interviews with Medina that appear both in her book and in his article. He showed particular ingenuity in discovering that a quote Medina incorrectly attributed to a 2006 interview she conducted with Raul Espejo (quote p. 186 fn. 53, p. 288) was actually something that “one of Cybersyn’s directors remarked at the time.” Contemporary remarks are more historically reliable that those given decades later, so this is another way in which Morozov’s is a more profound historical contribution than Medina’s. As Jorge Luis Borges noted in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” an entertaining history article, Menard believed that “Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.” We live in that future, and Morosov is our champion. It would be a crime for him to spend years working on a Ph.D. thesis with footnotes and the other accoutrements of mediocrity. Let him instead do what only he can do: take up the project of Menard and complete the Quixote. There must be no more grumbling against this great and humble scholar. Cabal dismissed. Tom.