As I read it, Morozov's essay has two main points: 1. Propaganda is now self referential. Especially that the selling point of "Government 2.0" is an analogy t

As I read it, Morozov's essay has two main points: 1. Propaganda is now self referential. Especially that the selling point of "Government 2.0" is an analogy to "Web 2.0" and "Open," where neither "Open" nor "Web 2.0" has any kind of meaning to begin with. 2. A specific consequence of this is, that the policy debate is no longer about the goals of a policy but about manipulation of meaningless symbols. It is then quite interesting to read O'Reilly's comments, since he actually does not refute (or even criticizes ) Morozov's points, but only asserts again that 'Open Government' is a better way to archive some policy goals. This is of course a highly subjective and somewhat unfair compression of an interesting exchange, but functional for my main point: I completely agree both with Morozov and O'Reilly, just on different levels. Morozov does indeed raise very good questions. On the other hand, open government is an important tool to archive some policy goals, at least for some definition of open.