Technosolutionism
The belief that technology can solve complex social, political, and collective action problems that are fundamentally human in nature.
The idea that the right app, platform, or algorithm can fix problems of coordination, governance, inequality, or trust. Named and critiqued most influentially by Evgeny Morozov in To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).
The core claim
Technosolutionism treats messy, contested human problems as engineering problems with clean technical solutions. If people aren't cooperating, build a platform. If institutions are corrupt, replace them with a blockchain. If politics is dysfunctional, optimize it with data.
The appeal is real: technology has genuinely solved hard problems. But technosolutionism errs by assuming that coordination failures are primarily information or incentive design problems, rather than conflicts of interest, power, values, or history.
Why it fails for collective action
Collective action problems — Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag hunt, commons dilemmas — are not solved by better tools. They require trust, norms, institutions, and political will. Technology can support these but cannot substitute for them:
- A carbon credit marketplace doesn't resolve disagreements about who should bear the cost of climate transition
- A civic engagement app doesn't fix the underlying reasons people distrust government
- A coordination platform assumes people already agree on goals — the hard part is usually that they don't
Origins and connections
Technosolutionism is closely tied to Californian Ideology — the Silicon Valley blend of countercultural optimism and market libertarianism that sees technology as inherently liberating and progress as inevitable.
It also reflects a kind of Neoliberal ideology: by framing problems as technical rather than political, it sidesteps questions of distribution and power. "Disruption" becomes a substitute for redistribution.
So what?
For anyone working on collective action, technosolutionism is a real temptation and a real trap. Coordination tools matter — but the hard work is always social and political. The question is never just "can we build this?" but "what are the power relations, incentives, and histories that make this problem persist?"
