On Solutionism and Lolcats

Spending as much time as I do teaching, writing and thinking about technology, I come across solutionism a lot.  (From the link: Morozov defines solutionism as “a pervasive and dangerous ideology… that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution”.)

Talking about this topic can be a bit of a balancing act.  I don’t want to deny the transformative power of technology, either.  But every once in a while I’m talking to someone who’s just so enthusiastic about how tech will “change the world” that I can’t help asking: if that’s true, why can’t the internet save cats?

The argument makes itself.  Clearly the internet loves cats: a google search for “cats” turns up half a billion results. You can’t go a few hours online without stumbling across a picture of a cat in a sink or a top hat or studying physics.

(No seriously. Click that last one.)

But for all the love we lavish on pictures of cats, we do very little to help cats themselves, and so millions are euthanized each year. If I had a dollar for every cat picture on the internet - and if I donated all of that that money to spay and release programs - it might lower populations enough that euthanasia wouldn’t be necessary.

What is the technological solution to this?  An app that recognizes cat pictures and donates $0.25 every time you view one?  A non-profit cat-picture-hosting site where all proceeds go to spay and release programs?  A bot that replies to mentions of cats or links to cat pictures with euthanasia statistics?

This isn’t just a technical question: it’s a psychological and sociological one.  We are, as a species, pretty bad at translating our good intentions into effective actions.  We are, as a culture, pretty bad at working together to protect the collective good - even when the collective good is millions of adorable kitties.

The lesson I take from all this?  Technological solutions that ignore what psychology, history, sociology and cultural studies have to teach us are, to put it simply, neutered.