The
publication Foreign
Policy runs
a regular feature entitled “Think Again” in which some or another contributor
addresses an issue he deems to be misunderstood by otherwise knowledgeable
people. Each section therein deals with some assertion that the author seeks
to correct or clarify; the intent is to bring a skeptical eye to widely-held
views on matters of global significance, which is a fine thing to attempt when
the writer in question is a competent essayist and thinker rather than some
other, lesser thing.
In the May/June issue, FP contributing editor Evgeny
Morozov takes to “Think Again” in an effort to bring clarity to the general
subject of the Internet as it pertains to freedom and representative
government. "The Internet has been a Force for Good,” reads the first
assertion to be addressed. The answer, Morozov says, is “No," and he begins to
explain why the answer is "No" and not "Yes" or "I don't know" by reminding us
of the hopes expressed by web enthusiasts back in the early days of
connectivity, occasionally in their own words. "The Internet was lauded as the
ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the
planet into one great wired global village," he reminds us.
Something
seems to have gone awry, though, and fifteen years later tolerance remains
unfostered, nationalism is still in existence, and our planet is only a wired
global village to the extent that it can be compared to such a thing. Morozov
does cite one actual claim made long ago by the pro-internet crowd, here
quoting the 1994 manifesto "A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age", which, as he
notes, promised the advent of "electronic neighborhoods bound together not by
geography but by shared interests." This is an odd claim to cite as
representative of unfulfilled hopes insomuch as that it appears to have been
fulfilled if we take the metaphor "electronic neighborhoods" to mean what it
obviously means and the clause "bound together not by geography but by shared
interests" to mean what it even more obviously means, and then observe that we
do indeed now have such things in the form of online communities made up of
people "bound together not by geography but by shared interests," including
blogs such as Daily Kos, user-driven discussion sites such as Reddit, and
thousands of other such things. If Morozov has a different definition in mind,
he has kept it secret from us.
Incidentally,
this marks one of the two occasions in the entire article on which Morozov
bothers to quote any of the assertions he ascribes to his opponents, and on
neither occasion are we treated to anything so bulky as an entire sentence,
but then print magazines are subject to space constraints. Limited by his
medium, Morozov is forced to continue here by merely summarizing an assertion
by Nicholas Negroponte, who "dramatically predicted in 1997 that the Internet
would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace"
or at any rate stated something approximate to that.
Whatever
Negroponte said in 1997, it was apparently wrong. “The Internet as we know it
has now been around for two decades,” Morozov reminds us, “and it has
certainly been transformative... But just as earlier generations were
disappointed to see that neither the telegraph nor the radio delivered on the
world-changing promises made by their most ardent cheerleaders, we haven't
seen an Internet-powered rise in global peace, love, and liberty." I wouldn't
know how to measure the degree of global love, much less to what extent one
should attribute any change in such a thing to the Internet. This puts me at a
disadvantage when dealing with Morozov, who seems to have had a head start on
this, and so I will concede the point, even more readily so since he hammers
it home by noting that the Internet has facilitated "the increased global
commerce in protected species.” Meanwhile, a group of Serbians have been
"turning to Facebook to organize against gay rights" while a group of Saudi
Arabians are supposed to be setting up some sort of online version of their
Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice squad. All in all, "Many of the
transnational networks fostered by the Internet arguably worsen - rather than
improve - the world as we know it." Why this necessarily leads to the
conclusion that the Internet has not been a force for good is left
unaddressed, but there is, as I pointed out, a full-page picture of a hand
holding a mouse on the facing page.
Having accomplished whatever it is that
just happened, Morozov moves on to address more specific assertions such as,
“Twitter Will Undermine Dictators." This, it turns out, is “Wrong.” “Tweets
don’t overthrow governments; people do," Morozov begins, adding that social
network sites have proven “both helpful and harmful to activists operating
from inside authoritarian regimes." Again, one expects to see Morozov at least
attempt to make the case that they have been more harmful than helpful, but he
does not even seem to consider this to be a productive line of inquiry;
instead, he is busy forgetting what it is that he had set out to prove - that
it is "Wrong" to assert that "Twitter Will Undermine Dictators" - and has
instead apparently just decided to make the case that Twitter has not managed
to actually overthrow
any dictators after a few years of existence. "Neither the Iranian nor the
Burmese regime has crumbled under the pressure of pixelated photos of human
rights abuses circulated on social networking sites,” he points
out.
Not
only has Twitter failed to take down two regimes, but one of those regimes has
attempted to use the service for its own ends. "Indeed, the Iranian
authorities have been as eager to take advantage of the Internet as their
green-clad opponents. After last year's protests in Tehran, Iranian
authorities launched a website that publishes photos from the protests, urging
the public to identify the unruly protestors by name." We are not told how
effective this turned out to be or why this necessarily cancels out the
effectiveness of Twitter in organizing the protests to begin with or how the
fact that dictators use websites shows that they are not being undermined by
the use of Twitter. The fellow’s talent is being wasted in socio-political
commentary when he could be writing mysteries.
“Take
the favorite poster child of digital utopians,” Morozov continues, citing a
random example to which some digital utopians may occasionally refer. “In
early 2008 a Facebook group started by a 33-year-old Columbian engineer
culminated in massive protests, with up to 2 million people marching in
Bogota’s streets to demonstrate against the brutality of Marxist FARC rebels.
(A New
York Times
article about the protests gushed: ‘Facebook has helped bring public protest
to Colombia, a country with no real history of mass demonstrations.’)” We
might have been fooled into taking this as a factual assessment of what was
going on in Colombia had the New
York Times
refrained from gushing it, which is a dishonest rhetorical trick and we should
be thankful to Morozov for pointing it out to us. “However, when the very same
‘digital revolution’ last September tried to organize a similar march against
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, they floundered.” Facebook, then, cannot always
be used to effectively undermine dictators in neighboring countries; pass it
on.
“Internet enthusiasts argue that the Web has made organizing easier,”
Morozov continues. “But this is only partially true,” which is to say that it
is only easier to the extent that it is easier. “Taking full advantage of
online organizing requires a well-disciplined movement with clearly defined
goals, hierarchies, and operational procedures.” I would retort that such
things are necessary in order to take full advantage of anything, and that
there is nothing of which anyone has ever taken full advantage, but that
nonetheless these imperfect entities do manage to accomplish things, and that,
again, Morozov was supposed to be showing that Twitter doesn’t undermine
dictators, not that it frees protester organizers from the necessity of goals
and procedures.
Our
correspondent next dismisses the myth that “Google Defends Internet Freedom,”
noting that the company does so “Only when convenient.” I’m not aware of
anyone who argues otherwise other than Google’s public relations people, but
at any rate Morozov manages to shoot them down.
Next up on the chopping
block is the claim that “The Internet Makes Governments More Accountable.”
“Not necessarily,” Morozov retorts, noting that “even when the most detailed
data get released, it does not always lead to reformed policies,” here citing
an example of an occasion on which the Internet did not make a particular
government more accountable and thereby refuting the argument that “The
Internet Always Makes Every Government More Accountable in Every Way” which no
one has ever made. True accountability, he adds, “will require building
healthy democratic institutions and effective systems of checks and balances.
The Internet can help, but only to an extent.” That all “help” is inherently a
matter of “extent” and not entirety does not prevent Morozov from throwing out
this redundant qualifier by virtue of its perceived use in minimizing the fact
that the Internet can indeed be of help in building or reforming such
institutions.
The
Internet and the claims made on its behalf merit skeptical scrutiny.
Skepticism, though, is more than contrarianism in the face of a given claim,
and it is wholly incompatible with the style of argument such as we have seen
above, being a haphazard mixture of anecdotal evidence, selective amnesia,
non-sequiters, and loaded terminology. When publications "gush" factual
assertions and opponents are twice characterized as "cheerleaders" in the
space of a single essay, it is not difficult to determine that the essayist in
question is seeking shortcuts to persuasion. And when an essayist sets out to
debunk an assertion as not only unproven, but entirely wrong, and attempts to
do this by the use of anecdotal evidence that is weaker than the contrary
anecdotal evidence he seeks to nullify, and anyway shifts from attacking the
original assertion to attacking a broader assertion that no one has made, and
does all of these things several times in various combinations, we ought not
be surprised that the essayist should have chosen to resort to such shortcuts
in the first place, and we may even be inclined to allow these things as a
handicap if we are the magnanimous sort, which we are not.
The
Internet has not proven itself to be some surefire weapon against tyranny or
injustice or bad taste, but the same can be said for the written word and,
really, everything. But aside from being wrong, arguments to the effect that
the last decade has shown the Internet to be a failure as a tool of political
change are almost beside the point if our intent is to better understand what
the Internet will look like in the future. Had Morozov written a similar essay
five years ago, he would have been arguing against the revolutionary efficacy
of a landscape that is drastically different from what we see today - one in
which Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were as yet unknown. Five years from now,
new and entirely different tools will be in use, and existing tools will be
used in different ways. The Internet will continue in its rapid evolution, the
world in turn will be tugged along in the wake of its influence, and the means
of human collaboration will continue to multiply just as they have for the
last decade and a half - which is to say, orders of magnitude faster than ever
before in human history, and in an environment of fast-increasing social
complexity. We have barely received a taste of the phenomena with which we and
our very dictators will be confronted in the coming years.