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Evgeny Morozov giving a talk on “A Twitter revolution without revolutionaries”. Photo by Daniel Seiffert. .

Top 10 Fun Facts about Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov is an American writer, researcher, and intellectual from Belarus who studies political and social implications of technology. He was named one of the 28 most influential Europeans by Politico in 2018. Morozov was born in 1984 in Soligorsk, Belarus. He attended the American University in Bulgaria and later lived in Berlin before moving to the United States.

He is the founder of the Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative, and author of, among others, “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom”. Let’s look at the Top 10 Fun Facts about Evgeny Morozov.

1. Morozov is an internet skeptic

Evgeny Morozov and Christine Rosen in conversation. Photo by New America. .

Morozov expresses skepticism about the popular view that the Internet is helping to democratize authoritarian regimes, arguing that it could also be a powerful tool for engaging in mass surveillance, political repression, and spreading nationalist and extremist propaganda.

He has also criticized what he calls “The Internet Freedom Agenda” of the US government, finding it na茂ve and even counterproductive to the very goal of promoting democracy through the Web.

2. He published his first book in 2011

In January 2011, Morozov published his first book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. In addition to exploring the impact of the Internet on authoritarian states, the book investigates the intellectual sources of the growing excitement about the liberating potential of the Internet, linking it to the triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War. Morozov also argues against the ideas of cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism.

3. Morozov published another book on internet use in 2013

In March 2013, Morozov published a second book, To Save Everything, Click Here. Morozov criticizes what he calls “technology solutionism”, the idea that, as Tim Wu put it, “a little magic dust can fix any problem”.

However, Wu, whose own work is severely criticized by Morozov, dismisses Morozov’s book as “rife with such bullying and unfair attacks that seem mainly designed to build Morozov’s particular brand of trollism”, and “a missed opportunity” to discuss the issues.

4. He studied in Harvard

As of 2013, Morozov pursued a PhD in the history of science from Harvard, which he obtained in May 2018. He regularly holds lectures in the framework of university programs, cultural centers, and has developed teaching and mentorship activities.

He particularly studied political and social implications of technology and has a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University.

5. His articles are widely published

The Limits of Technology in an Imperfect World, 18 March 2013. Photo by Chatham House. .

His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times among many other publications. Morozov鈥檚 award-winning debut book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Public Affairs, 2011), explores the impact of the Internet on authoritarian states. His second book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Public Affairs, 2013), examines the effects of technology on subjects ranging from politics and criminology to weight loss.

6. He is the founder of The Syllabus

He is the founder of The Syllabus, a digital platform for discovering and distributing overlooked high-quality content. The Syllabus monitors thousands of video channels, podcasts, magazines, newspapers, academic journals, and other digital repositories.

Then, machine learning aggregates content based on a score, which an algorithm automatically assigns to each piece. In this way, it collects, analyzes, and classifies relevant information. The Syllabus publishes a weekly newsletter and personalized recommendations for its subscribers. It then makes the previously indexed pieces available to subscribers in a searchable archive.

7. He writes for the blog Net.Effect

Keynote with Evgenij Morozov, researcher and writer. Photo by Internetdagarna 2015.

Morozov writes the much-quoted Foreign Policy blog Net.Effect, and is known for debunking  with facts, figures and sound research myths and media-bandwagon assumptions about the impact of the Internet and mobile technologies on politics and society.

We all want to be cyber-optimists, assuming that free societies necessarily follow from free data. Morozov is careful to say that it’s not quite that simple: yes, social change can be empowered by new tech, but so can the policies of repressive regimes.

8. He locks his phone away when writing and reading

When writing or reading about matters digital, he stashes his phone and router cable in a time-locked safe to prevent distractions. When he was mocked online about this he responded: 鈥淏elieve me, I鈥檝e gone through all the necessary literature in moral philosophy and I still don鈥檛 see a problem.鈥�

9. He does not identity as Belarusian

He鈥檚 decidedly not American, but doesn鈥檛 identify as a Belarusian, either. He doesn鈥檛 even like visiting Belarus, and of all the reasons he might use to justify that attitude, the one he chooses to relate is that he is far too picky about his diet.

He recently lost nearly 100 pounds by working out on a rowing machine in his apartment while watching European art-house cinema. He says with a smirk that he likes his coffee made just so, and that he needs to eat sushi at least once a week.

10. He was taught English at a young age

Photo by Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung. .

Growing up in the potassium-mining town of Soligorsk, where half the city鈥檚 population works for the government-owned mine, Morozov says he made the calculation at age 6 or 7 that he would have to work his way to a life abroad. When he was an adolescent, his parents, who both worked in professional positions at the mine until they retired, hired a friend of the family to tutor Morozov in English.

In addition to working with her daily for five years, he practiced several hours a day on his own, essentially devoting the period of his life from ages 12 to 17 to preparing for the SAT. His reward was a full scholarship from the Open Society Foundations to attend American University in Bulgaria, where he joined a collection of strivers from throughout the former Soviet bloc.