Spring, 2018. Evgeny Morozov is standing on a rubber mat in a hotel room in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The world’s foremost technology critic is scared. He’s afraid of dying knowing that there are books he doesn’t know about.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of books are strewn around the room. On the floor, on the chair, on the bed, under the bed, next to the bed. There’s an open book on a desk in front of him. He uses an iPad to snap pictures of its pages, flipping them at great speed with two fingers. On a good day, he scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day.
Morozov scans books he believes he should read someday. He knows which ones to read because he has devised a system that can determine the relevance of every book in the world. And his system isn’t just for books. It’s for all information and knowledge.