You are reading this article thanks to the greatest invention of the last 50 years: the internet. The web is often regarded as a panacea for absolutely everything. It is revolutionising the world’s economy. It is changing leisure and entertainment. And it is also a political tool that can liberate oppressed people. Jared Cohen, a former internet guru at the US State Department, once remarked:
‘Any combination of these [digital] tools [Facebook, Google etc.] allows for a greater chance of civil society organizations coming to fruition regardless of how challenging the environment.’
There is nothing that this incredible device can’t do. It is the greatest ever democratiser.
But, a few dissenting voices have risen above the fevered chorus. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, is one such voice. He says that the internet is much misunderstood and not always on the side of good. It has made western governments more powerful [through surveillance], and it has done the same for totalitarian regimes, many of which use this agent of freedom as an instrument of suppression. Iran, China, Russia and Syria are cases in point, each with their own human tragedy attached to them. He spoke to the Spectator about those liberal westerners whose lazy, utopian thinking asks too much of the Net. Here is a transcript of some of our discussion:DB: Your book has been described as iconoclastic. Did you intend to challenge Panglossian western thinking on the power of the internet directly?
EM: Yeah sure. That was part of the book’s objective, I guess. I came to this issue and this topic from the world of activism, of NGOs and non-profits organisations [in the democracy promotion field]. And I was frustrated by the projects and how so many of them backfired. They [the NGOs] didn’t really seem to notice their failures and they kept trying to justify them, saying that their projects had been successful and were actually delivering some of the objectives that had been set. And I just thought that was ridiculous. So, the iconoclasm was deliberate and I knew that [it] would be offensive to some people.
DB: In the State Department and Silicon Valley?
EM: Yes and elsewhere — it’s a big industry.
DB: Do you think that it’s intellectual exhaustion on the part of policy makers? Seeing the web as a panacea?
EM: I think it would be very misleading to understand their attitudes to the internet without understanding their foreign policy briefs, agendas and the previous history of democratisation. So, obviously people who sit on the Iran desk will feel somewhat differently to people sitting on the China desk, when it comes to assessing the power of the internet. So a lot of people I dealt with working on the other side, when I was still in the activist role, were people dealing with Russia and Belarus and central Asia — basically the former Soviet Union. And those people tried everything and everything failed. They have tried supporting the opposition; they have tried supporting the NGOs; they have tried supporting investigative journalists; and some point they have tried supporting the youth movements and pulling off colour revolutions of all sorts. And everything failed. So, I think that the internet — Facebook, Google, whatever — did provide a certain hope that wasn’t there before simply because it hadn’t been tried yet and hadn’t failed.
DB: How do you measure failure where the Internet is being used to democratise?
EM: Well, it’s not always obvious. With political parties, it’s obvious — there aren’t any elections. With investigative journalists, you look at their articles. With social media, the metrics are kind of obscure. But also, I think people were frustrated by what had gone before, so they wanted to see things that weren’t really there. So they looked at China and said: ‘Aha! Look at these are young people that are challenging such a powerful, authoritarian regime! In China?!’ This is their blind spot: they don’t see the situation on the ground because they only see what they want to see. So that was part of what I tried to do and I think it worked. But it was about much more than countering their attitudes about technology — those attitudes are themselves contingent on foreign policy experience, their expectations and their past history. You cannot easily disentangle those factors from their general thinking.
DB: Technology can be used to organise protests – you can sign the petition. But can technology turn that potential into action? Is there a technological fix for democracy or do western governments have to pursue more organic means?
EM: I’m not against technology fixes per se. I think there are contexts in which they are useful. And I think that the more detailed breakdown of a situation that you have, the more you understand of it and the finer the textures through which you see reality, the easier it becomes to break [an oppressive system] down by applying a technological fix to a particular set of problems. But, obviously, it would be hard to build an App to counter authoritarianism because who knows what authoritarianism is. So a lot of the debate about technology and its usefulness operates in this very abstract environment, where we are talking about what does the internet do for democracy. But in a sense that question assumes that the internet actually exists as a stable artefact and that we can replace the internet with a toaster and you wouldn’t see the difference. I think that’s a very unhealthy and misleading approach…
DB: That the internet is a homogenous entity?
EM: Yes. I’m even becoming sceptical about that. I mean at this point, I say this in the afterword of the book, which didn’t appear in this country, which is me coming to terms with the criticisms I’ve had and responding to the Arab Spring and Wikileaks and so on. I advanced the idea that maybe we should impose a moratorium on using the word ‘internet’, and instead try to use more precise language. If we’re talking about search engines, let’s refer to them as search-engines. And if we’re talking about social networking, let’s talk about ‘social networking’. And if we’re talking about facial recognition technologies, let’s talk about those. But let’s not mesh all of this up together and then expect to find this factor that tells us what the Internet is and what it does. The internet is not a toaster! It is many different things, but there is not materiality that can enclose its being. There are a lot of debates about the philosophy of technology, about meaning and functions, and the existence of data. So while some it is material, most of it is virtual. Sot’s very hard to bring it to the level of something that is analysable.DB: Which obviously affects questions about technology and democracy.
EM: This is part of my problem. Questions about the internet and democracy assume too much and demand too much of the internet. But also democracy itself is a sticky word. The Chinese government would say that the Chinese already live in a democracy, and they’d say that you have in America and Britain is not a democracy. They’d point at your new surveillance laws and say, ‘Hey it’s more draconian than what we have, how dare you criticise us?’
DB: Ye s, but we’d retort that was about policing criminals with cheap technology.
EM: Sure, as I said, I’m not against technological fixes. I’ve been studying how different cities police their metros, their subways. Berlin, for example, trusts travellers: so you buy your ticket, you travel and occasionally someone might come and check your ticket. In New York, you have turnstiles that you cannot circumvent. While in London, you have a hybrid system. And all of them assume different things of the people who use them. You know, probably, the Berlin system is far more liberal than the New York system because it gives them the opportunity to do wrong and then pay for it. So, it’s not a technological fix. In New York, it’s a complete technological fix. So the technology takes away our ability to do wrong. It automates virtue. So it’s a technological fix that works. It just needs to be scrutinised and debated. So there are technological fixes. When you are trying to do something small and you know what you want to accomplish, such as policing your metro system, it’s binary thing: either you get there and it works or it doesn’t. With democracy it’s much more difficult.
DB: OK. What about the other side of the coin: the organic approach to democracy. Have we in the West been poor at that, and is that a failure of intelligence?
EM: I don’t think it’s a failure of intelligence. It’s about approach. In my book, one of the major messages is that we have a very confused sense of how modern authoritarianism works. It works differently. You take Syria and Singapore and you could describe both of them as authoritarian, but it’s a situation where the word ‘authoritarian’ loses its meaning because politically, socially and culturally, Syria is so vastly different from Singapore. So we need to get a much better idea of how big countries, like Russia and China and possibly Iran, how did they manage to embrace globalisation and capitalism without embracing liberal democratic values. And how that transition happened, and how they sold it to their people, what makes them tick. Those questions are tackled very rarely – the dominant thinking in policy circles and some corners of academia is that capitalism necessarily brings democratisation, that people demand representation and rights. And who knows? Maybe that is happening in China. I don’t think it’s technology that’s confusing us, it’s the inability to come up with a coherent narrative to explain how, Russia and China essentially, are no longer the regimes that they were 20 years ago before the end of the Cold War. And since we cannot accept that the rules have changed, we still imagine Russia and China as they were in the 80s, and that is why we’re so excited about the internet. We think that the reason that the Russian and Chinese leaders are in power is because their people are coerced and that they are ignorant of human rights, the political situation. And we think that the moment we give them access to the right information…
DB: They will rebel successfully?
EM: Yes.
DB: So, the Arab Spring. In London, a few months ago, Richard Allen, Clay Shirky and Rachel Whetstone went to a conference, the Guardian’s Open Weekend.
EM: I was invited, but you know…
DB: They were talking about the internet and the Arab Spring and Iran. And they all with Rachel Whetstone when she said, ‘In the Arab Spring, the internet was the chick in the dam.’ Do you agree?
EM: Is this some Britishism? I don’t know what it means.
DB: Like, hole in the dam.
EM: Yeah OK. What was the word she used?
DB: Chink.
EM: Chink. So, what do you want me to say? I think it’s stupid. People say stupid things about the internet. But again, the internet has clearly played a role — no one is denying that. You know, Twitter, Facebook have all had a role to play. But, at this point, the question is really about methods and how we record the narrative. Do we want to record how the Egyptian government tried to manipulate Facebook and Twitter, or how the business interests of Facebook, Twitter and Google resulted in the [digital] environment being less secure for activists? So there are all sorts of ways to record that and assess it. Though it will take many more years because we don’t know the role of other factors: like the Egyptian army, the Muslim Brotherhood etc.
DB: Yeah. And the almost religious obsession with the web’s possibilities?
EM: Well, you know, the internet is there and it’s easy to talk about and it sells and people pay off their mortgages talking about nothing but the internet. But it doesn’t mean that it is important! One of the definitions of being cyber-utopian is that you are willing to ascribe importance to the internet without having seen evidence, and that’s as close to an ideological commitment as it gets.
Comments