With some strategic skimming I think I've been able to get at the point of Morozov's essay: It's a complaint about the corruption (or "pollution") of language.

With some strategic skimming I think I've been able to get at the point of Morozov's essay: It's a complaint about the corruption (or "pollution") of language. Given the 20th century that's a reasonable thing to worry about: in retrospect, language is often the canary in the coal mine, warning of the approach of Fascism. The problem is that his argument doesn't really come together. He rightly makes fun of "Web 2.0" as a pointless buzzword, but that's a complaint beyond it's sell-by date. Nobody says that with a straight face anymore, except as a vague marker for a time-period of website fashion. It's not a concept anyone associates with anything of serious importance. He also makes a side-remark about '“Open,” “networks,” and “information”' that I don't really get: networks and information are mostly used in a rigorous technical sense by the tech community as far as I can tell. His main thrust is reserved for "open", but he doesn't really make the case here either; there's a long retelling of the old free software vs. open source battle, but promoting a new, roughly descriptive term to draw a distinction between two things is hardly the stuff of Goebbels. This is apparently being extended into "Open government". This, as far as I can tell, is the core point arrives: Morozov can put up with transparency and accountability, but extending that into "open government" that obligates government agencies to permit the public to collaborate with them is not ok. This reduces government into provider-of-services, a set of replaceable parts like the NIH or the Federal Highway Administration that either do their task or don't, and if they don't, can be changed. This is a very sad, small box to put the government into if you've become emotionally invested in the idea of the state as the manifestation of our collective will. In this world, the "political and moral principles" of the government are of central importance and the primary goal of politics is to petition this god-state into a benevolent and not evil ruler by ensuring that it is not blind to the concerns of everyone. This is where his point kind of falls apart, as he doesn't seem to quite distinguish the problems with the evil all-containing-god-state (Singapore, more or less) from the problems with the technocratic, apolitical, one-institution-among-many service-provider state that he claims O'Reilly is pushing for. Lumping these two opposites together makes the whole argument kind of mushy.