To Save Everything, Click Here

Overview

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013) is Evgeny Morozov's critique of the worldview of Silicon Valley and its admirers. Its target is "technological solutionism": the redefinition of all complex human problems as technical problems awaiting digital fixes. From "smart" cities and the quantified self to gamification and civic-hacking, Morozov shows how the imperative to "solve" everything with apps and platforms not only fails to solve the problems but destroys our ability even to understand them.

The book is organized as a tour of solutionist thinking: the Internet of Things, the "sharing economy," the quantified self, the "smart" home, the reformation of politics through technology, and the ethics of the fix itself. Each chapter combines a critique of specific technologies with a deeper philosophical argument about the nature of problems, politics, and human freedom. The result is the most sustained attack yet written on the idea that the internet is the answer to every question — even the ones it has itself created.

Core Ideas

Technological Solutionism

Morozov's master concept is defined with care: solutionism is "the redefinition of all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized." The key move is the redefinition: before the solution is offered, the problem itself is reshaped to fit the available technology. Politics becomes "civic engagement," learning becomes "gamification," health becomes "self-quantification," the city becomes a "smart" platform. Solutionism is not merely ineffective; it is epistemically violent, because it forecloses the prior question of what the problem really is — a question that is always political, ethical, and contested, and never simply technical.

Internet-Centrism

Underlying the solutionist worldview is what Morozov calls internet-centrism: the assumption that the internet is the lens through which all social and political questions must be refracted. The internet-centrist sees "the cloud," "the platform," "the network" everywhere, and treats technologies modeled on the internet — open, decentralized, participatory — as inherently good. Morozov's counter-argument, developed from his earlier book The Net Delusion, is that the internet is not a value but an infrastructure, and that its political meaning depends entirely on who owns it, who watches it, and who profits from it. Internet-centrism is a category error that mistakes a medium for a politics.

The Politics of the Fix

The book's deepest argument is that solutionism is a political program in disguise. When a problem is defined as technical, the solution belongs to engineers, platforms, and "smart" systems — not to citizens, legislatures, or movements. The "sharing economy" redefines labor rights as a trust problem and solves it with reputation scores; "civic hacking" redefines democratic accountability as an app problem; "smart" cities redefines urban planning as a data problem. In each case, power migrates from democratic deliberation to technical administration, and the language of efficiency quietly replaces the language of justice. The problem with the fix, Morozov insists, is not that it fails but that it succeeds — at changing the terms on which the problem can be raised at all.

The Value of the Unfixable

Against solutionism, Morozov defends the irreducibly messy, inefficient, and unfixable dimensions of human life. The "dark matter" of society — the informal, the ambiguous, the slow, the contradictory — cannot be captured in dashboards and feeds, and its destruction is the real cost of the "smart" revolution. His positive proposals are deliberately unfashionable: build institutions that define problems rather than solve them; defend the "cool" slowness of genuine deliberation against the "hot" speed of the network; treat the internet as a terrain of political struggle rather than a neutral tool. The book is, in the end, a defense of politics itself — of the human activity of arguing about what matters, which no algorithm can replace.

The Smart City and the Internet of Things

Morozov's analysis of the "smart city" is a sustained case study in solutionism. The smart-city vision treats the city as a platform: sensors measure traffic, energy, and behavior; algorithms optimize flows; and governance becomes a matter of data-driven management. What is lost in this vision, Morozov argues, is the city as a political space — a place of conflict, surprise, and public deliberation, where the question of what a good city is cannot be answered by an algorithm. The smart city also centralizes power: whoever owns the platform owns the urban experience, and the citizen becomes a data point in a system they cannot see. The internet of things, in this light, is not a convenience but a form of government, and its "solutions" are quietly deciding who the city is for.

Historical Context

The book appeared in 2013, at the height of the "sharing economy" and civic-tech enthusiasm, when Silicon Valley's influence over public life seemed boundless: the quantified-self movement was booming, "smart cities" were being planned around the world, and the dominant discourse held that the internet would democratize everything from journalism to government. Morozov wrote as a critic from the digital-left, drawing on his Eastern European experience of authoritarianism and his distrust of all techno-political panaceas. The book belongs to the moment when the first serious doubts about the "internet will fix it" consensus were being raised — doubts that have since become mainstream.

Legacy

To Save Everything, Click Here is the definitive critique of technological solutionism, and its coinages — "solutionism," "internet-centrism," "the folly of the fix" — have become standard terms in the critical study of technology. The book helped turn a generation of scholars and journalists away from the celebration of platforms toward the analysis of their politics, and its arguments anticipate the later debates about surveillance capitalism, platform power, and AI hype. It anchors the techno-pessimism tradition in the digital age and connects it to digital humanism.

Critics have charged that Morozov's negativity can shade into a refusal to offer constructive alternatives, and defenders of the tech industry have accused him of caricature. But the book's central demand — that technology justify itself politically, that problems be allowed to remain problems until they are democratically defined — has only grown more urgent. In an age of AI-driven "solutions" to everything from education to governance, To Save Everything, Click Here remains the essential warning against the fantasy that everything can be fixed by a click.

The book's critique has aged well: the smart cities, quantified selves, and solutionist apps it dissected are now the default furniture of digital life, and its questions — who defines the problem, and who benefits from the fix? — are the questions of every serious debate about AI and data. Its defense of the unfixable remains the sharpest antidote to the fantasy of the click.

Sources

• Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013.
• Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.
• Morozov, Evgeny. "The Folly of Technological Solutionism." The New York Times, March 2, 2013.
• Greenfield, Adam. Against the Smart City. New York: Do Projects, 2013.