Green shirt

 The critiques that Morozov directs at my framework thus apply with far greater force to the alternatives he himself advances.

For example, Daniel Saros’s proposal for a digital socialism, which Morozov praised in the New Left Review, distinguishes between credits and points, as my framework does, but embeds this distinction in a repeated auction that resets preferences and allocations at each cycle. It offers no theory of investment, no account of the political shaping of production, and no conception of worldmaking technological innovation. In fact, Saros abandoned the idea shortly after writing about it.

Morozov’s turn to cybernetics (borrowing from and then expanding on Eden Medina’s work) suffers from the same limitations. Cybernetics is a theory of systems that detect deviations and restore coherence in response to disturbance. Even in Stafford Beer’s most sophisticated formulations, the core concern is not innovation but viability: maintaining a system’s identity under changing conditions. Cybernetic management systems adapt to goals, but because those goals enter as exogenous policy assumptions, cybernetics cannot account for their dynamic transformation through either technological innovation or political conflict. As a research program, cybernetics has also long since been exhausted.

These limits matter because what Morozov treats as a challenge unique to AI—the endogenous formation of worlds through use—is in fact a general feature of periods of rapid technological change. Such moments do not simply expand the space of possibility; they force collective choices about which possibilities will be realized widely and which will remain marginal or unrealized. The problem, then, is not how to govern an exceptional technology, but how to organize production when technological dynamism collides with finite investment capacity and shifting social priorities.

Contrary to Morozov’s reading, addressing this challenge requires neither treating technology as neutral nor assuming that values must be settled in advance. Markets can be retained as spaces of decentralized experimentation, where possibilities are surfaced and explored. Political institutions, in turn, must take responsibility for investment coordination: deciding which trajectories are scaled, revised, or abandoned as their consequences unfold. In a post-capitalist future, Morozov may wish to push a generative-AI accelerationist path; I would prioritize a rapid green transition. Others will argue for slower, more cautious transformations, or for different forms of technological reorientation altogether.

These disagreements cannot be resolved by local experimentation alone, nor by consensus-oriented deliberation, nor by technocratic state control . . ."

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-real-political-economy-of-technology/