The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [112]
The nurturing of dissent has always depended on the ability of existing dissidents to cultivate certain myths around their activities, if only to encourage others to follow suit. Many in the Russian dissident community still fondly remember how Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, would secretly meet in the park—a radio their sole companion—to listen to and transcribe foreign radio broadcasts. Or how the Czech and Polish dissidents would secretly meet in the mountains on the Czech-Polish border, sit next to each other pretending to be resting, only to pick up each other’s bag on leaving, thus facilitating cross-border exchange of samizdat. Such tales, whether true or not, helped to cultivate a certain image of a renegade dissident; such a distinct cultural phenomenon must have had enormous political repercussions, if only in terms of inciting romantic youths to join the movement.
Since most successful dissident groups that operated in closed societies before the Internet did not embed visiting anthropologists who could hang around them for a year and study how they came to be who they were, we only have a cursory knowledge of what gave rise to their dissent and courage. Take the issue of censorship, which, on first sight, may look unconnected to dissent. Will people be more likely to become dissidents if they regularly run into government censorship? Will it help if the censorship is visible and intrusive—think radio jamming, with all of its noises and crackles—as opposed to the more silent, internalized, and mostly invisible censorship of newspapers? At least one scholar of Cold War history argued that radio jamming could indirectly breed dissenting attitudes, for it “excites listener curiosity about programs being jammed, increases suspicion of the authorities’ motives for jamming, and supports the people’s faith in what Radio Liberty has to say.” This is not to argue that censorship is good but rather to suggest that most people who chose to oppose their governments during communism did not just wake up one day fashioning themselves as dissidents; their politicization was a slow and complicated process that we are only beginning to understand.
The kind of oppositional politics made possible by the Internet—where all communication is assumed to be protected (even when it is not), where anonymity is the default rather than the exception, where there is a “long tail” of political causes an activist may be involved in, where it’s easy to achieve tactical but mostly marginal victories over the state—is not likely to produce the next Václav Havel. Someone still has to go to prison. And many bloggers do just that. But they are still predominantly lone wolves, all too often by their own choice, who 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 critique of their governments in interviews with Western media. Yoani Sánchez, a prominent Cuban blogger hailed by Time magazine as “one of the world’s most influential people,” is far better known outside of Cuba than inside, which, of course, is not for lack of trying, itself an act of heroism given Cuba’s restrictive system of media controls. Still, in their ability to guide the moral outlook for an entire generation, Sánchez’s numerous blog posts, poignant as they are, hardly amount to a single play by Havel. Becoming Cuba’s Havel may not be the goal that Sánchez has set for herself, but this is not how most of her Western supporters, who confuse blogging with samizdat, see it.
Likewise, it’s certainly remarkable