And it's worth asking: Who is the "we" in all of this? It's the we of the op-ed idiom, of course. But Morozov devotes such attention to actors and institutions, individual CEOs and thinkers. He requires such specificity from others. Yet in his public policy calls, suddenly, the actors recede and the putative societal we emerges.

He does have a few excellent suggestions in his positive program. One sparkling idea is an audit board for algorithms, allowing companies to maintain secrecy while ensuring that anti-social or discriminatory practices have not been encoded within them. Another is a brief sketch of a "post-Internet" model for thinking about digital technologies. These things are good.

It is in using things that users discover and transform what those things are. Examining ideology is important. But so is understanding practice.

In his final chapter, Morozov attempts to describe a method of gadget making that meets his ethical criteria. The products he points to in his final chapter are, to put it frankly, broken. He's taken design fictions that are meant to encourage "user-unfriendliness" and put them at the center of what technology should be. Appliances that act erratically when your energy usage rises. A radio set that changes stations when energy usage rises. An extension cord that twists in pain when devices in standby mode are left plugged into it. A lamp that dims unless you keep touching it.

I think he's made these technologies into the means; broken things make you focus on their brokenness, not whatever the brokenness is supposed to point to. Would a car that randomly runs out of gas make you consider the pipeline infrastructure and ecological destruction that our oil economy requires? Or would you just go get a new car? His advice is not the sort of thing technologists can follow.

Morozov acknowledges that, "without a thorough theoretical scaffolding, all these 'erratic appliances' and 'technological troublemakers' can be easily dismissed as quirks of fancy postmodern designers," but the truth is: No matter what theoretical scaffolding you give them, no one wants a radio that gets fuzzy when it's near electrical fields. Almost no one will use these things.

That's important because it is in using things that users discover and transform what those things are. Examining ideology is important. But so is understanding practice. What will make Morozov's account so generative is precisely how much has been left out about how people use things. People like David Edgerton at Imperial College London have argued that scholars who study "technology" need to break away from thinking about it as an advancing wave of new things and focus on what people are actually using, day-by-day.

I remember sitting with Morozov at Stanford in March of last year, when he told me that his goal for the work was to destroy the concept of "the Internet" in the way that historians of science had destroyed the concept of "science." But try asking a scientist if that's happened. The Berkeley anthropologist of science, Paul Rabinow, put it well. "A major gap has developed today between scientists' self-representation and the representations of scientists by those who study them," he wrote in a 1996 book. "While this discrepancy is of little consequence for practicing scientists (most will have never heard of its existence), it provides much of the subject matter and the authority for the social studies of science."