Technological Solutionism
Origin: Evgeny Morozov (To Save Everything, Click Here, 2013)
Definition
Solutionism designates the belief that every problematic situation calls for a technical solution and that such a solution exists. It is the tendency to reformulate complex questions as optimizable problems, to reduce social, political, or ethical issues to equations that technology could solve.
Morozov identifies two characteristic failings of solutionism: on the one hand, it simplifies problems to the point of distorting them in order to make them technically solvable; on the other hand, it creates new problems by solving those it has itself defined.
In my writings
Solutionism is a structuring critical stance in my analyses. Before evaluating a technical device, I invite posing the preliminary question: is the technical solution relevant to the identified problem? This question is often absent from the dominant discourse, which puts ethics at the forefront and treats it as a checklist of boxes to tick, and regulatory compliance as a substitute for reflection.
The absence of this preliminary question produces tools that respond to poorly posed problems, or even to problems that the tools themselves have helped create. No impact analysis preceded the launch of ChatGPT. This “peculiarity” of the technology market perfectly illustrates solutionist logic: deploy first, think later.