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
dont 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 fellows
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 Bogotas 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 doesnt 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. Im not aware of anyone who argues otherwise other
than Googles 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.