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By Root 1838 0

daily press”—was that it lay outside of political structures and exerted very little influence on them. The press forced people to develop strong opinions on everything but rarely cultivated the urge to act on them; often people were so overwhelmed with opinions and information that they would indefinitely postpone any important decisions. Lack of commitment, caused by the multiplicity of possibilities and the easy availability of quick spiritual and intellectual fixes, was the real target of Kierkegaard’s critique. He believed that only by making risky, deep, and authentic—one of Kierkegaard’s favorite terms—commitments, by discriminating between different causes, by dealing with both triumphs and disappointments of such choices, and by learning from the resulting experiences, do people acquire wisdom and fill their lives with meaning. “If you are capable of being a man, then danger and the harsh judgment of existence on your thoughtlessness will help you become one” is how he summed up the philosophy that would come to be known as existentialism.

It’s not hard to guess what Kierkegaard would have made of today’s Internet culture, dominated by the 24/7 cycle of punditry and fluid engagement with ideas and relationships. “What Kierkegaard envisaged as a consequence of the press’s irresponsible and uncommitted coverage is now fully realized on the World Wide Web,” writes Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher at the University of California at Berkeley. A world where professing one’s commitment to social justice requires nothing more than penning a socially conscious Facebook status would have greatly rankled Kierkegaard. His Twitter account would surely be hard to find. It’s safe to assume that sites like RentAFriend.com, where you can “rent a friend to go to an event or party with you, teach you a new skill or hobby, help you meet new people, show you around town” by choosing from more than 100,000 members registered on the site, would not be much to Kierkegaard’s liking. Ukrainian Web entrepreneurs have adapted RentAFriend’s model to the protest needs of their country’s numerous political movements by setting up a website that allows anyone organizing a rally to “shop” for registered users, mostly students, who, at just $4 hour per hour, are eager to chant political slogans of any ideology. The entrepreneurs would not be among Kierkegaard’s Facebook friends either.

And yet the Dane’s philosophy is useful in grasping the ethical and political problems associated with digital activism, especially in the context of authoritarian states. It’s one thing for existing and committed activists who are risking their lives on a daily basis in opposition to the regime to embrace Facebook and Twitter and use those platforms to further their existing ends. They might be overestimating the overall effectiveness of digital campaigns or underestimating their risks, but their commitment is “authentic.” It’s a completely different thing when individuals who may have only cursory interest in a given issue (or, for that matter, have no interest at all and support a particular cause only out of peer pressure) come together and start campaigning to save the world.

This is the kind of shallow commitment that Kierkegaard detested and saw as corrupting the human soul. Such high-minded moralizing may seem out of place today, but then no one has yet toppled an authoritarian government by assuming the posture of a clown and cracking jokes about the guillotine. Even when structural conditions favor democratization, an opposition movement composed of meek and characterless individuals will most likely fail to capitalize on such openings.

The problem with political activism facilitated by social networking sites is that much of it happens for reasons that have nothing to do with one’s commitment to ideas and politics in general, but rather to impress one’s friends. This is not a problem caused by the Internet. For many people, impressing one’s peers by pursuing highly ambitious causes like saving the Earth and ending another genocide may have been the key