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.
On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 4:04 PM,
<SkeptInq@aol.com> wrote:
Barry
Yeah, apparently everyone's encountered this guy except
for me. I really don't mind, as I like crazy people. Google "Time
Cube" sometime if you want a real kick.
On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 5:29 PM,
<SkeptInq@aol.com> wrote:
Just read your blog on True/Slant - sorry to see you were
Mabused, but welcome to the club. I delete him
probably 5-10 times a day, under a variety of names. He is
the most persistent crank I've ever come across.
I enjoyed the blog and really like the sarcastic
tone.
Best.
Barry Karr
CSI & Skeptical
Inquirer
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn,
NY
512-560-2302
--
Regards,
Barrett
Brown
512-560-2302