The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [102]
Digital Natives of the World, Unite!
And engaged many of them already are. When in 2008 the streets of Colombia got filled with up to a million angry protesters against the guerillas of the FARC movement, which has been terrorizing the country for decades, it was a Facebook group called No Más FARC (No More FARC) that got credited for this unprecedented mobilization. (In 2008 FARC dominated Colombian news with a series of high-profile kidnappings.) Launched by Oscar Morales, a thirty-three-year-old unemployed computer technician, the group quickly gained members and became a focal point for spreading information about the protests, earning the support of the Colombian government in the process.
The American government was just a Facebook request away as well. Morales, who later became a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, got a note from U.S. State Department’s Jared Cohen, the American bureaucrat who one year later sent the infamous email request to Twitter. Cohen wanted to come to Colombia to study the details of Morales’ impressive online operation. Morales didn’t seem to mind.
Cohen’s visit to Colombia must have been inspirational, for just a few months later the State Department soft-launched an international organization called the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), built on the assumption that cases like Colombia’s are going to be more widespread and that the U.S. government needs to be an early player in this field, doing its share to facilitate networking among such “digital revolutionaries.” A series of high-profile summits of youth movements—one was even moderated by that staunch defender of Internet freedom Whoopi Goldberg—duly followed.
In its brief history, AYM has emerged as something of a digital-era equivalent of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a supposedly independent artistic movement that in reality was created and funded by the CIA to cultivate anticommunist intellectuals during the early stages of the Cold War. (Unfortunately, AYM’s literary output is nowhere as prodigious.) Now that the battle for ideas has shifted into cyberspace, it is bloggers rather than intellectuals that the U.S. government wants to court.
George W. Bush Institute’s James Glassman, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, kicked off AYM’s first summit in New York, explaining that the meeting’s purpose was to “bring about two dozen groups together with top technologists from the United States and produce a manual ... [to help] other organizations that want the information and technological knowledge to be able to organize their own anti-violence groups.”
Companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV, and AT&T attended the New York summit, along with groups like the Burma Global Action Network, Genocide Intervention Network, and Save Darfur Coalition. (A representative from Balatarin, a prominent Iranian social news site, was present at AYM’s second summit in Mexico.) The gathering was meant to send yet another powerful message that American companies, perhaps with a gentle push from the U.S. government, were playing an important role in facilitating democratization and that digital technologies—above all, social networking—were instrumental in pushing back against oppressors. “Any combination of these [digital] tools allows for a greater chance of civil society organizations coming to fruition regardless of how challenging the environment,” proclaimed Jared Cohen, giving perhaps one of the sharpest articulations of both cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism to date.
Impressed by the success of the Colombian group, American officials decided to embrace social networking sites as viable platforms for breeding and mobilizing dissent, expressing their willingness to fund the creation of new sites if necessary. Thus, in 2009 the State Department ran a $5 million grant competition in the Middle East, soliciting funding requests for projects that would “develop or leverage existing social networking platforms to emphasize