Beyond Competition: Alternative Discovery Procedures & The Postcapitalist Public Sphere
A lecture by Evgeny Morozov, Author, "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom"
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Please join us for a lecture by Evgeny Morozov, a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.
Abstract
One of Friedrich Hayek's most celebrated essays — "Competition as a Discovery Procedure" (1968) — tells us tantalizing little about the existence of other such procedures. Hayek's insistence that competition is the surest and most reliable technique of eliciting innovation is well reflected in today's digital landscape, dominated as it is by digital platforms, with their stated goal of facilitating market exchange. Yet, beyond Hayek's favorite bugbear of central planning, there surely must be other ways of "discovery" — even if they do not currently "scale" as well as the techniques of competition. This talk will explore the intellectual and political benefits of placing "discovery" at the center of our debate about the future of the digital public sphere and suggest potential directions for adequate policy-making on the issue.
About the Speaker
Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion (2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013). He is also the founder and the publisher of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative. He holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University.
This lecture is presented as part of the SSRC-sponsored research initiative, "Solidarity and Strife: Democracies in a Time of Pandemic,” co-organized by D-Lab and Social Science Matrix. This event will also be co-sponsored by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group.
