Tengo la impresión de que en España se conoce poco a Evgeni Morozov (Bielorrusia, 1984). No me suena que se haya traducido The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, y pocas veces lo he visto citado en los medios, a pesar de su visibilidad en la prensa (anglo)sajona.
Morozov es un cafre inteligente, uno de esos tipos que conoce bien las dictaduras (como la que aún se mantiene en su país de origen), y que, por tanto, sabe que cualquier cosa puede usarse con fines totalitarios. De hecho, su interés fundamental se centra en el uso totalitario que se contiene en las nuevas tecnologías.
El año pasado irrumpió como elefante en cacharrería, denunciando, con una agudeza e inteligencia notables, «los engaños de la red», que fue como tradujo el título de su libro Luis M. Alonso, en un magnífico artículo que se publicó en La Nueva España, y que es lo único de interés que conozco sobre Morozov en nuestro idioma.
No voy a hacer un recorrido por las polémicas que Morozov ha ido levantando en estos meses. Pero me gustaría llamar la atención sobre un ensayo larguísimo y delirantemente estimulante (de hecho, en Italia se acaba de publicar como libro exento) que salió a mediados de marzo en The New Republic: «Form and Fortune. Steve Jobs’s pursuit of perfection—and the consequences», y que es un ataque furibundo contra la filosofía de Steve Jobs y la «religión de las apps».
A mí el ensayo me parece un alegato socialistoide al estilo de otro conocido «pensador» poscomunista (Zlavoj Žižek). Antes o después, el mundo se cansará de Morozov, como lo ha hecho de Žižek, que se ha convertido en una caricatura de sí mismo; pero mientras tanto el furibundo ataque del bielorruso a la «falsa religión» del intocable iGod no puede pasar desapercibida. Como una abeja especialmente punzante que se esfuerza en agujerear la piel de un buey (al que le bastará un movimiento de la cola para tumbarla).
No voy a hacer una crítica del ensayo, simplemente voy a dejar aquí algunas citas reveladoras del mismo, para dar una idea del interesantísimo disparate, que recomiendo encarecidamente.
Neither Jobs nor Ive tells us exactly what he means by “pure,” […] It appears that “pure” products exhibit a perfect correspondence between their form and what both Jobs and Ive refer to as their “essence.” […] It is a kind of industrial Platonism. […] Pure products are born, not made; any visible signs of human assembly—say, screws—would make it hard to believe in the higher integrity, the perfection, of the product.
The idea that the form of a product should correspond to its essence does not simply mean that products should be designed with their intended use in mind […] No matter how trivial the object, there is nothing trivial about the pursuit of perfection. On closer analysis, the testimonies of both Jobs and Ive suggest that they did see essences existing independently of the designer—a position that is hard for a modern secular mind to accept, because it is, if not religious, then, as I say, startlingly Platonic.
Apple’s most incredible trick, accomplished by marketing as much as by philosophy, is to allow its customers to feel as if they are personally making history—that they are a sort of spiritual-historical elite, even if there are many millions of them.
Jobs’s most impressive achievement was to persuade the shackled masses that they could see the Platonic forms without ever leaving their caves. Marketing—with its shallowness and its insidious manipulation of the consumer—would normally be relegated to the inferior realm of appearances, but it took on a different function in Jobs’s business metaphysics: it played the gospel-like role of showing us the way to the true, natural, and pure products that have not yet been spoiled by the suffocating and tasteless ethos of faceless corporations such as IBM and Microsoft.
Apple’s embrace of the “app paradigm”—whereby activities that have been previously conducted on our browsers shift to dedicated software applications on our phones and tablets—may be destroying the Internet in much the same way that the automobile destroyed the sidewalks and the playgrounds […] The total and exclusive focus on the tool at the expense of its ecosystem, the appeal to the zeitgeist that downplays the producer’s own role in shaping it (“whatever happens is … ”; “feeling the direction”), the invocation of the idea that technology is autonomous (“these things take on a life of their own”)—these are all elements of a worldview that Lewis Mumford, in criticizing the small-mindedness of those who were promoting car-only travel in the 1950s, dubbed “the bankruptcy of social imagination.”
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