Virtual revolution
The Net Delusion – how not to liberate the world
Evgeny Morozov
Published Allen Lane, 2011, £14-99
Reviewed by Judy Beishon
IS THE internet a wonderful new tool for achieving
democracy and freedom across the world? This is the question that Evgeny
Morozov examines, tearing apart step by step the many arguments of
Western mainstream politicians and commentators that it is. "Opening up
closed societies and flushing them with democracy juice until they shed
off their authoritarian skin is just one of the high expectations placed
on the internet these days", he notes. He calls this "cyber-utopianism".
He also criticises "internet-centrism", the implementation of policies
that are based on cyber-utopianism.
Morozov reminds us that this attitude is nothing
new: "the rhetoric that accompanied predictions about earlier
technologies was usually every bit as sublime as today’s quasi-religious
discourse about the power of the internet". For instance, in 1868 the
British ambassador to the US said that the telegraph would transmit
knowledge of events, remove causes of misunderstanding and promote peace
and harmony throughout the world.
The telegraph certainly aided the progress of
capitalism and imperialism. By 1889, however, the Spectator journal was
condemning it for causing "a vast diffusion of what is called ‘news’,
the recording of every event, and especially of every crime, everywhere
without perceptible interval of time. The constant diffusion of
statements in snippets… must in the end, one would think, deteriorate
the intelligence of all to whom the telegraph appeal".
Morozov similarly examines claims made later about
the radio and then television, adding the qualification: "Predicting the
future of the internet is a process marked by far greater complexity
than predicting the future of television because the web is a technology
that can be put to so many different uses at such a cheap price".
The US neo-cons have taken cyber-utopianism the
furthest, though there are not many mainstream politicians who have not
succumbed to it. For instance, Gordon Brown, when UK prime minister,
said the 2009 uprising in Iran was a reminder of the way that people are
using new technology. He concluded: "You cannot have Rwanda again
because information would come out more quickly about what is actually
going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action
would need to be taken". Morozov responds: "On Brown’s logic, the
millions who poured into the streets of London, New York, Rome and other
cities on February 15, 2003, to protest the impending onset of the Iraq
war made one silly mistake: They didn’t blog enough about it".
On the many comments in the media saying that the
Iranian uprising would not have happened without Twitter, Morozov argues
that there is no conclusive evidence that a large number of people in
the opposition Green movement in Iran actually were tweeting. A mistaken
impression could have been given by the tweets of Iranians in the
three-million-strong diaspora and other sympathisers. In early 2010,
Al-Jazeera’s director of new media said that "fact-checking by his
channel during the protests could confirm only 60 active Twitter
accounts in Tehran, a number that fell to six once the Iranian
authorities cracked down on online communications".
Morozov criticises the US State Department for
asking Twitter to keep its services going for Iranians during the
uprising instead of shutting down for planned maintenance work. He
argues that this and the many claims carried in the Western media that
US-based companies like Facebook are ‘promoting democracy’ around the
world have resulted in authoritarian regimes clamping down on internet
communication by protesters.
While he is right to warn about and draw attention
to the close links between companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google
with the US establishment (which he does several times), his idea that
authoritarian regimes would not have readily noticed these links had the
US government and media acted differently is over-egged. In any case,
the internet has rapidly become a much-used tool of authoritarian
regimes themselves and this is a central theme of the book. Morozov
explains how it has enormously aided their ability to develop methods of
surveillance and censorship and has therefore dealt out new dangers to
opposition activists.
Many examples are given of the way in which
authoritarian governments have developed use of the internet for
propaganda purposes. The author says: "It’s high time that we disabuse
ourselves of the naive belief that the internet makes it easier to see
the truth and avoid government shaping of the news agenda". He explains
that the state is better positioned to step into the ‘decentralised’
public discourse on the internet than individual bloggers, etc, with
examples such as the ‘news’ and entertainment dished out online by the
Russian government, the games and music downloads provided by the
Chinese government and the social networking site launched by Vietnam’s
ministry of information and communications.
Morozov now lives in the US but was born in Belarus
in eastern Europe and shows a particular interest in that region. He
analyses and dismisses the idea that communism in eastern Europe failed
because the regimes had a ‘monopoly on information’ or that "tearing
down firewalls can match the tearing down of the Berlin wall".
His frustration at seeing various degrees of
authoritarianism still existing in eastern Europe comes through in his
book. He points out at length that governments and big business use
cheap internet entertainment partly to try to distract people from
politics and opposition activity. This is true. But, in assessing the
consequences, he shows little understanding of the factors that propel
workers towards political involvement and mass struggle and little
confidence that they will move into action in eastern Europe. Instead,
he concludes that "the drive for entertainment simply outweighs the
drive for political knowledge". This leads him to dismiss the "politics
favoured by the masses" in Russia as "populist, xenophobic, and vulgar",
in one passage. In another, he says that the masses of Belarus "have
drowned in a bottomless reservoir of spin and hedonism". Perhaps he is
revising some of his views in the light of the revolutions that have
swept across North Africa and the Middle East since he wrote his book!
The Net Delusion is rich in interesting information
and many of Morozov’s conclusions ring true. He recognises the benefits
of the internet for opposition movements: that the means of
communication it provides can alter the "likelihood and the size of a
protest". Understandably, however, he felt it necessary to devote his
book to the widespread exaggerations of the role actually played by
these new means.
He makes apposite comments about the problem of
people thinking that they can be political activists through supporting
causes on Facebook instead of engaging in political activity on the
streets and through face-to-face discussions and meetings. Facebook and
Twitter have not proved to be successful ways of converting "awareness
into action", he notes, and quips: "Today, aspiring digital
revolutionaries can stay on their sofas forever – or until their iPads’
batteries run out".
Some opposition bloggers achieve a level of
prominence, he adds, but they can "operate without much in the way of
popular appeal. Instead of building sustainable political movements on
the ground they spend their time receiving honorary awards at Western
conferences and providing trenchant critiques of their governments in
interviews with Western media". They often become better known outside
their own countries than inside.
Importantly, Morozov warns that, although the
internet can be a valuable means of communication in opposition
movements, it can also be used to spread misinformation and rumours as
easily as useful information. He also touches on the lack of democratic,
organised debate and the lack of leadership that are hallmarks of social
networking sites: "When every node on the network can send a message to
all other nodes, confusion is the new default equilibrium". In contrast:
"Revolutions prize centralisation and require fully committed leaders,
strict discipline, absolute dedication, and strong relationships based
on trust".
The author tries to suggest the best ways that
dissident activists can be helped by Western governments, for example,
by giving them the latest encryption and privacy-protection technology.
He criticises the fact that Western companies provide authoritarian
governments with technology that can aid internet censorship and
surveillance, and that Western sanctions on technology exports to a
number of countries can conflict with rhetoric about ‘internet freedom’.
He observes that the top web-based service (mainly
US) companies engage in their own censorship globally. For example, "a
2009 study found that Microsoft has been censoring what users in the
United Arab Emirates, Syria, Algeria and Jordan could find through its
Bing search engine much more heavily than the governments of those
countries".
However, Morozov expresses confusion. On the one
hand, he largely adopts the premise that Western ‘policy-makers’ are
engaged in the noble act of spreading ‘democracy’ around the world, the
problem being that they do not sufficiently recognise the pros and cons
of the internet in doing so.
On the other hand, he admits: "Technologists… can
talk all they want about the ‘internet freedom agenda’… but it is not
going to alter what motivates the United States to behave as it does in
the Middle East or Central Asia any more than its overall concerns with
human rights and freedom of expression. Concerns over getting oil out of
Azerbaijan won’t give way to concerns over getting tweets from the Azeri
opposition anytime soon, if only because Washington has long made a
strategic decision not to undermine the friendly Azeri regime".
Furthermore, Morozov notes that "some Western
governments – Australia leads the pack here – are constantly flirting
with censorship schemes that bear an eerie resemblance to those of
China", and he gives some examples. It is true that Western capitalist
governments are using domestically more and more of the repressive
measures previously seen mainly in authoritarian regimes. On the issue
of the foreign policy of Western governments, socialists would go a step
further and say that, rather than promoting democracy and human rights,
they are using these issues as a mask to further their interests
globally in gaining trade advantages and further exploiting human labour
and natural resources.
The book reminds us that the internet is also widely
used by racists, exploiters in the sex industry, and terrorists. And it
describes some of the sinister uses that new developments could lead to
in the future, including customised censorship, the use of face- or
voice-recognition technology for repressive purposes, more cyberwarfare
and cybercrime.
But, unintentionally, it also gives glimpses of how
the internet could significantly aid the development of a future
socialist planned economy. Even today, Morozov notes that, aggregating
"tiny digital trails into one big data set – sometimes across entire
populations – could produce illuminating insights into human behaviour,
point to new trends, and help predict public reaction to particular
political or social developments". Google is able to run a "powerful
marketing intelligence firm", based on what people search for.
The technological means to collate the views and
wishes of millions of people using a few keyboard strokes will be a very
useful tool in a democratically run socialist society, if accompanied by
democratic discussion at all levels by elected representatives in the
‘real’ world.
What are Evgeny Morozov’s conclusions? While
recognising that technology does create change, he rightly rejects
‘technological determination’, the idea that change is preordained by
the technology adopted.
He is also on the right lines when he rejects the
idea that technology is neutral. Although he expresses it in a confused
and sometimes incorrect way, he recognises that it is created to serve
certain interests and is "embedded into enabling social environments".
Socialists would say that it is presently part of class society,
capitalism, which means that, ultimately, one or other class (or a
section of a class) is using it in its own particular interests.
Morozov realises that "most of the firewalls to be
destroyed are social and political rather than technological in nature".
But the furthest he goes in advocating changes in society are comments
such as: "for the internet to play a constructive role in ridding the
world of prejudice and hatred, it needs to be accompanied by an
extremely ambitious set of social and political reforms".
Within capitalism (as he does not think beyond it)
he argues that the controversial issue of anonymity should be addressed
by "democratic deliberation", and Western government foreign policies
for ‘internet freedom’ should be guided not by internet ‘experts’ but by
those who are familiar with the situation in the target countries.
Overall, he concludes pessimistically: "It’s highly
doubtful that wicked [ie the most challenging] problems can ever be
resolved on a global scale". This attitude is not surprising as he
approvingly quotes a Columbia university intellectual as characterising
people in general as a "mixture of greed, pride, arrogance and
hostility". Morozov adds: "Technology changes all the time; human nature
hardly ever". A socialist could counterpoise this with: It is capitalism
that causes greed and hostility; workers will remove it and create a
society in which technology can be developed for the good of all. |