In a lengthy profile of Evgeny Morozov, Michael Meyer devotes some space to criticism of his contrarian style:
Many of Morozov’s opponents dismiss him as a spoiled child, someone who sits in the corner refusing, as Tim O’Reilly once said, to be “useful,” shouting insults at the adults as they role up their sleeves and solve the world’s problems. Reviewing Morozov’s second book in The Washington Post, Columbia law professor Tim Wu spoke of Morozov’s “promise” as a thinker before lamenting, “One suspects he aspires to be a Bill O’Reilly for intellectuals.” Morozov faces similar criticism even among his supporters. He once defended his style by saying, “We’ve got too many priests and not enough jesters,” an explanation Joshua Cohen, the Stanford professor who brought Morozov to Palo Alto on a fellowship and published some of his earliest long-form work in Boston Review, told me is “bullshit. There’s a vast open field between priests and jesters.”
Morozov insists that his refusal to be useful is its own kind of usefulness—and even, as he recently wrote in one of his essays for German newspapers, an intellectual duty. Traditionally, this is an uncontroversial definition of the role of the critic in intellectual life. But not in the relentlessly sunny realm of the tech gurus, where such obstinance must be baffling, even perverse. The current discourse around digital technology is more nuanced than the caricature Morozov often presents, but its defining idea is that we are living through a benevolent revolution, and that we’re all united by good intentions as we search for new models for our economy and our lives. In this culture of mutual validation, Morozov’s targets are the makers, the innovators, and the disruptors—the people doing, as frequent Morozov punching bag Jeff Jarvis put it, “God’s work.”
The Dish 