There is a particular habit of mind, endemic to Silicon Valley but spreading rapidly, that sees every human problem as a software problem in disguise. Homelessness? There’s a platform for that. Loneliness? An algorithm can fix it. Democratic decline? Surely blockchain holds the answer.
Evgeny Morozov named this tendency “solutionism” — the belief that the right technology, properly deployed, can resolve deep social and political contradictions without the messy work of politics, organizing, or structural change1. This paper extends his critique into the present moment.
The Template
Digital solutionism follows a recognizable pattern:
- Identify a problem that is genuinely painful and politically complex
- Abstract it into a data problem — strip away context, history, and power relations
- Build a technical system that addresses the abstraction
- Declare the problem solved or at least “disrupted”
- Externalize the costs and failures onto those least able to object
This template has been applied to education (MOOCs will democratize learning), healthcare (apps will replace doctors), governance (smart cities will optimize civic life), and countless other domains. In each case, the pattern produces the same result: a product that serves its creators and investors while leaving the underlying problem intact or worse.
What Gets Lost in Translation
When a social problem is translated into a technical specification, certain things are necessarily excluded. A housing algorithm cannot encode the history of redlining. A predictive policing system cannot account for the political choices that created the conditions it models. A mental health chatbot cannot substitute for the social infrastructure that prevents despair.
These exclusions are not bugs. They are features of a worldview that treats politics as inefficiency and solidarity as an unscalable solution.
The Efficiency Trap
Solutionism borrows its legitimacy from the language of efficiency. But efficiency is not a neutral concept — it always asks: efficient for whom? Measured by what? Over what timeframe?
A system that efficiently matches workers to gig economy tasks is efficient for the platform. For the worker, it may represent a profound loss of autonomy, stability, and dignity. The efficiency is real. So is the harm.
Reclaiming the Political
The alternative to solutionism is not technophobia. It is the insistence that technology operates within political and social contexts that it cannot transcend. Some problems require redistribution, not optimization. Some require solidarity, not connectivity. Some require less technology, not more.
The question worth asking is not “what can we build?” but “what should we build, and who decides?”
Footnotes
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Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs. ↩