10/17/14 10:55 AM Evgeny Morozov: Author of the Quixote?

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Reposted from the SIGCIS.org members discussion list which has been a
primary locus for discussion of the Medina/Morozov affair. The references
to a fictitious and sinister cabal of historians are explained by an earlier
case in which SIGCIS was characterized as such by the self-proclaimed
"inventor of email" and his friends.
From: Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org>
Date: 12 October 2014 15:45
Subject: Evgeny Morozov, Author of the Quixote?
To: members@sigcis.org
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. Ive 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
Medinas award winning 2011 book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and
Politics in Allendes Chile. Pedants noted that the article spent about twenty
paragraphs on the story of the Chilean Cybersyn network project of the 1970s,
closely recapping Medinas 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. Heres what happened. Morozov set out to write a
review essay focused on Medinas 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 didnt faze him. He read even more books. He pushed in many
directions at once. He followed in Medinas footsteps to read Beers papers in
Liverpool, to correspond with Beers former colleagues, and to interview Fernando
Flores who initiated Project Cybersyn with an invitation to British cyberneticist
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Stafford Beer. He even found out some things about Beer and Cybersyn that
Medina hadnt 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
Medinas entire research from the same original sources. So his final New Yorker
piece didnt 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 thats 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 Medinas work in passing as an entertaining
history. Two words might not sound like much, but The Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy (revised edition) summed up Earth and everyone on it as mostly harmless.
Heck, Ive seen posters for really bad movies that blew up fainter and shorter praise
in huge letters (Energetic! Some guy youve 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 Galisons 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. Its
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. Lets 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 hes drooling, but its
hard to tell with the light down here. The woman on the right doesnt look too sharp
either. Chances are that theyre both idiots. Hell, I wouldnt be shocked if all three
of you are idiots. Some of you dont even go to Harvard.
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So, implausible as this might seem, heres why I think Morozov is being unduly
modest about his own immense potential. Over the past six months Ive 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 Menards 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 coincideword for word and line for linewith 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.
Menards 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 Menards 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 Menards 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. Morozovs research began with Medinas 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.
Morozovs ability to repeat interviews with Medinas 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. Im sure that he also interviewed ngel 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
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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 Cybersyns directors
remarked at the time. Contemporary remarks are more historically reliable that
those given decades later, so this is another way in which Morozovs is a more
profound historical contribution than Medinas.
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 Evgeny 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.

From: Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org>
Date: 13 October 2014 10:42
Subject: Some notes on my Morozov/Menard address
To: members@sigcis.org
Dear Cabalists,
I am sorry to have to drag you back to our lair on such short notice, but a couple
more items are in need of our attention.
First, Im sorry to say that despite my full throated defense of Mozorov during our
last meeting it seems that some slow-witted critics are still not convinced. The
situation was fully resolved with his original Tubmlr post. Sadly he has been called
away from his work recreating Don Quixote to write a second Tumblr post. This is,
if anything, more compelling that the first and the situation is even resolvdier than
before.
As he makes clear at http://evgenymorozov.tumblr.com/post/99837458735/more-
on-the-cybersyn-essay the books and boxes Morozov photographed previously were
just the tip of the biblioberg. Hes photographed more sources. As he mentioned,
theres also plenty of factual detail in my piece that comes from the archives or
other sources. I think we can all agree that evidence some of the material in a
paper was ones own work is a surefire defense against any accusation that much of
the rest of the material wasn't At least thats what we were taught at the National
University of Uqbar where I got my Ph.D by mail. Academic misconduct appeals
there had a very high success rate.
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In addition Morozov is an exceptionally talented prose stylist, and for a man
working on that artistic level the position of every word is crucial. Mentioning
Medina in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, or ninth
paragraph paraphrasing her work would have ruined the aesthetics of his entire
piece and betrayed his readers. As he explained it, where you, the author, decide
to interrupt your piece and introduce the source matters whether you do it in
paragraph number three or paragraph number ten affects the overall flow and feel of
the argument. My responsibility as an author is both to the readers AND to the
sources that I draw upon. As a reader I certainly appreciate that level of dedication
to my wellbeing. Case closed. Again.
Second, some outrageous accusations have been made that my previous address
bore a greater than acknowledged debt to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. Let me
state for the record that I fully acknowledged my debt to Borges when I mentioned
his entertaining article at the end of my oration. He wrote a nice piece, but its
nothing special. Any further similarity in claims and word choices undoubtedly
results from our reliance on shared sources. I can say without fear of contradiction
that I have read every word Pierre Menard ever published, visited each archival
collection holding his letters and manuscripts, and interviewed all of his living
descendants. In addition a public address, even when taken down by goblin scribes
for dissemination to those unable to attend in person, is a very different format from
a journal article. There simply wasnt time to acknowledge every source before the
sun came up, which to say the least would have complicated your egress from our
lair. Mentioning Borges earlier wasnt an option either Im a very talented orator
and it would have spoiled the aesthetics of the speech and betrayed your interests as
listeners. Also, and Im disappointed that any of you missed this, the whole thing
was a book review.
Finally, I am afraid that we had to flog those scribes because the previous message,
and a few others they sent to the listserv yesterday, have not made it into the
archive. Our elderly pipermail daemon seems to be self-censoring, which is ironic.
So that we can better defend Morozov against the jealous and small minded I have
posted a copy of the earlier message at http://www.tomandmaria.com/
tom/writing/morozovquixote.htm.
Cabal dismissed.
Page copyright Thomas Haigh -- email thaigh@computer.org Home:
www.tomandmaria.com/tom. Updated 03/22/2011.