"Evgeny Morozov: 'We are abandoning all the checks and balances'"

Guardian article.

What I've tried to do in my reviews is engage seriously with these bullshit concepts, as if they were serious – to see whether an idea such as "cognitive surplus", of which Clay Shirky is very fond, has any meaning at all. I do close readings of things that aren't meant to be read very closely. That is how our technology discourse works, there are lots of great bloggers, soundbites and memes, but once you start putting them together you realise that they don't add up.

Does it bother you that Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky have many more Twitter followers than you?
Many of the internet pundits have more followers because Twitter plugged them on the suggested users list. They also happen to agree with Twitter's position and celebrate the very same things as Twitter celebrates. It shows how far from neutrality and objectivity all of those platforms are, they are sold to us as essentially ways in which anyone can become anything but they have all sorts of ways to manipulate who gets heard and seen.