Personally I think all web services should be using aliases (so you don't login with the username that other people see) and pass phrases rather than passwords.
I think the argument is neither reasonably made nor well done. It reads like a laundry list of gripes the author has, like "oh yeah, and one more thing, and look at this word, and what a fool this guy is, and one more, and and and" but with some nice verbage.
What he doesn't get to the heart of is, aside from the fact that the book may not be very good (which I can easily accept), why the central systems-and-data-driven plank that comprises much of TED-esque thinking is bad.
To take one example, he seems to find the whole notion of a hybrid age, or the singularity, as dangerous technocratic political thinking, something to be stamped out. Whereas look at the actual smart-device search-engine semantic-social world we're creeping toward and the post-political person understands that those are just inevitable outcomes. It's not whether the singularity might happen (or could be prevented) but when, and so the forward-looking thinking person should be trying to figure out the best uses of that.
He's also missed the pointed examples of Signapore and China by a country mile, mistaking older ideological associations (which, again, every forward-thinking person understands need to be resolved) for the efficiency argument. The reviewer's point is that efficiency leads to brutality, which is a very old-school political idea, but the TED-esque view generally looks for efficiency to promote/empower humanity.
Again, like Wikipedia, both more efficient and much better (but let's instead get distracted by talking about Jimmy Wales and how he named his children).
So, you know, like that. Morozov seems to want to make a middle-20th century argument about early 21st-century ideas, and it shows. He writes passably well (though this review could have been cut in half with no loss imo), but the core conceit (this TED stuff is techno-politics) is just fundamentally wrong.
The thing about TED is, wild-eyed though it may be, it's not a political agenda. It's (trying to be) beyond that, about technology and science and understanding, and while the result is often pretty technocratic it is actually often reflecting the benefits of self-organisation through tech. Stuff like Wikipedia, for example, is perfect TED-fodder because it shows demonstrable ways of doing things better.
People who do not understand that idea (of which they are many) criticise it on their own terms, and so miss the point. If you are used to seeing life through a political lens (as we might hazard the New Republic does) then TED looks like an agenda by a different name. However that's like religious people insisting that atheists must believe in something, even if that's belief in an idea. It is outside their framework of understanding to consider a person who does not hold any kind of belief.
So, personally (and I think the popularity of TED and RSA etc reflect this) this whole article reads like some venting from someone who doesn't really understand the concept, and so can only think of it in terms of politics. These Teddites must have a political view of some kind, right? No.
It's trans-political because it's about applied informational learning to solve problems. Politics itself being one of those problems.
Future of irrelevance to who exactly? The 1-in-10000 users who like to play with root level access and scripts and stuff perhaps, but do the other 9999 even notice the change? I'm thinking not.
Granted it's a big change from earlier times, the strategy of sandboxing works really well for security and general OS integrity (as iOS has proved) in a world that has no patience for fragmented and exploitative software. Perhaps we lose a little something in the process, but it's in the service of a better overall integrated service and experience.
Oh and by the way: Microsoft is going the same way too with Metro.
Lateness to market and image of Microsoft are thoroughly valid points, much like the reasons WebOS never worked out for Palm. There is a broader reason though:
Metro is a bad UI. It looks impressive in screenshots, but its usability is dismal. It relies too much on trying to guide the customer and be exciting rather and too little on creating a sensible and memorable logic that the user can intuit.
The implementation on WP7 is bad, all squished and uni-coloured (and on Xbox it's even worse). It does not bode well at all for Microsoft that they can't seem to remember that software is supposed to be used. It's like they've only learned the lesson of typography from Apple, and not the elegance of actual use.