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"Technology is not really about hardware and software any more. It's really about the mining and use of this enormous data to make the world a better place," Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, told an audience of MIT students in 2011. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who argues that his company's mission is to "make the world more open and connected," concurs. "We don't wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money," he proclaimed just a few months before his company's rapidly plummeting stock convinced all but its most die-hard fans that Facebook and making money had parted ways long ago. What, then, gets Mr. Zuckerberg out of bed? As he told the audience of the South by Southwest festival in 2008, it's the desire to solve global problems. "There are a lot of really big issues for the world to get solved and, as a company, what we are trying to do is to build an infrastructure on top of which to solve some of these problems," announced Zuckerberg.

In the last few years, Silicon Valley's favorite slogan has quietly changed from "Innovate or Die!" to "Ameliorate or Die!" In the grand scheme of things, what exactly is being improved is not very important; being able to change things, to get humans to behave in more responsible and sustainable ways, to maximize efficiency, is all that matters. Half-baked ideas that might seem too big even for the naïfs at TED Conferences—that Woodstock of the intellectual effete—sit rather comfortably on Silicon Valley's business plans. "Fitter, happier, more productive"—the refreshingly depressive motto of the popular Radiohead song from the mid-1990s—would make for an apt welcome sign in the corporate headquarters of its many digital mavens. Technology can make us better—and technology will make us better. Or, as the geeks would say, given enough apps, all of humanity's bugs are shallow.

California, of course, has never suffered from a deficit of optimism or bluster. And yet, the possibilities opened up by latest innovations make even the most pragmatic and down-to-earth venture capitalists reach for their wallets. After all, when else will they get a chance to get rich by saving the world? What else would give them the thrill of working in a humanitarian agency (minus all the bureaucracy and hectic travel, plus a much better compensation package)?

How will this amelioration orgy end? Will it actually accomplish anything? One way to find out is to push some of these nascent improvement efforts to their ultimate conclusions. If Silicon Valley had a designated futurist, her bright vision of the near future—say, around 2020 or so—would itself be easy to predict. It would go something like this: Humanity, equipped with powerful self-tracking devices, finally conquers obesity, insomnia, and global warming as everyone eats less, sleeps better, and emits more appropriately. The fallibility of human memory is conquered too, as the very same tracking devices record and store everything we do. Car keys, faces, factoids: we will never forget them again. No need to feel nostalgic, Proust-style, about the petite madeleines you devoured as a child; since that moment is surely stored somewhere in your smartphone—or, more likely, your smart, all-recording glasses—you can stop fantasizing and simply rewind to it directly. In any event, you can count on Siri, Apple's trusted voice assistant, to tell you the truth you never wanted to face back then: all those madeleines dramatically raise your blood glucose levels and ought to be avoided. Sorry, Marcel!

Politics, finally under the constant and far-reaching gaze of the electorate, is freed from all the sleazy corruption, backroom deals, and inefficient horse trading. Parties are disaggregated and replaced by Groupon-like political campaigns, where users come together—once—to weigh in on issues of direct and immediate relevance to their lives, only to disband shortly afterward. Now that every word—nay, sound—ever uttered by politicians is recorded and stored for posterity, hypocrisy has become obsolete as well. Lobbyists of all stripes have gone extinct as the wealth of data about politicians—their schedules, lunch menus, travel expenses—are posted online for everyone to review.

As digital media make participation easier, more and more citizens ditch bowling alone—only to take up blogging together. Even those who've never bothered to vote in the past are finally provided with the right incentives—naturally, as a part of an online game where they collect points for saving humanity—and so they rush to use their smartphones to "check in" at the voting booth. Thankfully, getting there is no longer a chore; self-driving cars have been invented for the purpose of getting people from place to place. Streets are clean and shiny; keeping them that way is also part of an elaborate online game. Appeals to civic duty and responsibility to fellow citizens have all but disappeared—and why wouldn't they, when getting people to do things by leveraging their eagerness to earn points, badges, and virtual currencies is so much more effective?

Crime is a distant memory, while courts are overstaffed and underworked. Both physical and virtual environments—walls, pavements, doors, log-in screens—have become "smart." That is, they have integrated the plethora of data generated by the self-tracking devices and social-networking services so that now they can predict and prevent criminal behavior simply by analyzing their users. And as users don't even have the chance to commit crimes, prisons are no longer needed either. A triumph of humanism, courtesy of Silicon Valley.

And then, there's the flourishing new "marketplace" of "ideas." Finally, the term "marketplace" no longer feels like a misnomer; cultural institutions have never been more efficient or responsive to the laws of supply and demand. Newspapers no longer publish articles that their readers are not interested in; the proliferation of self-tracking combined with social-networking data guarantees that everyone gets to read a highly customized newspaper (down to the word level!) that yields the highest possible click rate. No story goes unclicked, no headline untweeted; customized, individual articles are generated in the few seconds that pass between the click of a link and the loading of the page in one's browser.

The number of published books has skyrocketed—most of them are self-published—and they are perfectly efficient as well. Many even guarantee alternative endings—and in real time!—based on what the eye-tracking activity of readers suggests about their mood. Hollywood is alive and kicking; now that everyone wears smart glasses, a movie can have an infinite number of alternative endings, depending on viewers' mood at a given moment as they watch. Professional critics are gone, having been replaced first by "crowds," then by algorithms, and finally by customized algorithmic reviews—the only way to match films with customized alternative endings. The edgiest cultural publications even employ algorithms to write criticism of songs composed by other algorithms. But not all has changed: just like today, the system still needs imperfect humans to generate the clicks to suck the cash from advertisers.

This brief sketch is not an excerpt from the latest Gary Shteyn-gart novel. Nor is it dystopian science fiction. In fact, there is a good chance that at this very moment, someone in Silicon Valley is making a pitch to investors about one of the technologies described above. Some may already have been built. A dystopia it isn't; many extremely bright people—in Silicon Valley and beyond—find this frictionless future enticing and inevitable, as their memos and business plans would attest.

I, for one, find much of this future terrifying, but probably not for the reasons you would expect. All too often, digital heretics like me get bogged down in finding faults with the feasibility of the original utopian schemes. Is perfect efficiency in publishing actually attainable? Can all environments be smart? Will people show up to vote just because they are playing a game? Such skeptical questions over the efficacy of said schemes are important, and I do entertain many of them in this book. But I also think that we, the heretics, also need to take Silicon Valley innovators at their word and have just a bit more faith in their ingenuity and inventiveness. These, after all, are the same people who are planning to scan all the world's books and mine asteroids. Ten years ago, both ideas would have seemed completely crazy; today, only one of them does.

So perhaps we should seriously entertain the possibility that Silicon Valley will have the means to accomplish some of its craziest plans. Perhaps it won't overthrow the North Korean regime with tweets, but it could still accomplish a lot. This is where the debate ought to shift to a different register: instead of ridiculing the efficacy of their means, we also need to question the adequacy of the innovators' ends. My previous book, The Net Delusion, shows the surprising resilience of authoritarian regimes, which have discovered their own ways to profit from digital technologies. While I was—and remain—critical of many Western efforts to promote "Internet freedom" in those regimes, most of my criticisms have to do with the means, not the ends, of the "Internet freedom agenda," presuming that the ends entail a better climate for freedom of expression and more respect for human rights. In this book, I have no such luxury, and I question both the means and the ends of Silicon Valley's latest quest to "solve problems." I contend here that Silicon Valley's promise of eternal amelioration has blunted our ability to do this questioning. Who today is mad enough to challenge the virtues of eliminating hypocrisy from politics? Or of providing more information—the direct result of self-tracking—to facilitate decision making? Or of finding new incentives to get people interested in saving humanity, fighting climate change, or participating in politics? Or of decreasing crime? To question the appropriateness of such interventions, it seems, is to question the Enlightenment itself.

And yet I feel that such questioning is necessary. Hence the premise of this book: Silicon Valley's quest to fit us all into a digital straightjacket by promoting efficiency, transparency, certitude, and perfection—and, by extension, eliminating their evil twins of friction, opacity, ambiguity, and imperfection—will prove to be prohibitively expensive in the long run. For various ideological reasons to be explained later in these pages, this high cost remains hidden from public view and will remain so as long as we, in our mindless pursuit of this silicon Eden, fail to radically question our infatuation with a set of technologies that are often lumped together under the deceptive label of "the Internet." This book, then, attempts to factor in the true costs of this highly awaited paradise and to explain why they have been so hard to account for.

Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder, and the opportunity to err, to sin, to do the wrong thing: all of these are constitutive of human freedom, and any concentrated attempt to root them out will root out that freedom as well. If we don't find the strength and the courage to escape the silicon mentality that fuels much of the current quest for technological perfection, we risk finding ourselves with a politics devoid of everything that makes politics desirable, with humans who have lost their basic capacity for moral reasoning, with lackluster (if not moribund) cultural institutions that don't take risks and only care about their financial bottom lines, and, most terrifyingly, with a perfectly controlled social environment that would make dissent not just impossible but possibly even unthinkable.

The structure of this book is as follows. The next two chapters provide an outline and a critique of two dominant ideologies—what I call "solutionism" and "Internet-centrism"—that have sanctioned Silicon Valley's great ameliorative experiment. In the seven ensuing chapters, I trace how both ideologies interact in the context of a particular practice or reform effort: promoting transparency, reforming the political system, improving efficiency in the cultural sector, reducing crime through smart environments and data, quantifying the world around us with the help of self-tracking and lifelogging, and, finally, introducing game incentives—what's known as gamification—into the civic realm. The last chapter offers a more forward-looking perspective on how we can transcend the limitations of both solutionism and Internet-centrism and design and employ technology to satisfy human and civic needs.

Now, why oppose such striving for perfection? Well, I believe that not everything that could be fixed should be fixed—even if the latest technologies make the fixes easier, cheaper, and harder to resist. Sometimes, imperfect is good enough; sometimes, it's much better than perfect. What worries me most is that, nowadays, the very availability of cheap and diverse digital fixes tells us what needs fixing. It's quite simple: the more fixes we have, the more problems we see. And yet, in our political, personal, and public lives—much like in our computer systems—not all bugs are bugs; some bugs are features. Ignorance can be dangerous, but so can omniscience: there is a reason why some colleges stick to need-blind admissions processes. Ambivalence can be counterproductive, but so can certitude: if all your friends really told you what they thought, you might never talk to them again. Efficiency can be useful, but so can inefficiency: if everything were efficient, why would anyone bother to innovate?

The ultimate goal of this book, then, is to uncover the attitudes, dispositions, and urges that comprise the solutionist mind-set, to show how they manifest themselves in specific projects to ameliorate the human condition, and to hint at how and why some of these attitudes, dispositions, and urges can and should be resisted, circumvented, and unlearned. For only by unlearning solutionism—that is, by transcending the limits it imposes on our imaginations and by rebelling against its value system—will we understand why attaining technological perfection, without attending to the intricacies of the human condition and accounting for the complex world of practices and traditions, might not be worth the price.