The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [133]
From the perspective of freedom of expression, the inevitable end of the American Internet doesn’t look like good news. As bad and unresponsive as Facebook and YouTube might be as intermediaries, they would probably still do a better job defending liberty and self-expression than most Russian or Chinese companies (if only because the latter are more easily pressured by their own governments). The impressive gains in influencing foreign audiences on American-run Internet platforms that have been achieved in the last five years of universal ecstasy over Web 2.0 are easy to lose, especially if Western policymakers don’t acknowledge that the role American Internet companies play is increasingly seen as political. It is becoming more and more difficult to convince the world that Google and Twitter are not just the digital-age equivalents of Halliburton and Exxon Mobile.
On the Dubious Virtues of Exporting Damaged Goods
When the Obama administration decided to apply some of its Internet savvy to help improve American democracy, it did not expect to face many problems. But when Obama’s uber-geeks tried to crowdsource the process of agenda setting and ask Internet users for questions they thought the administration should be answering, they were faced by the brutal reality of Internet democracy. The most popular question was about the decriminalization of marijuana. “There was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation, and I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” said Obama, responding to some of the submitted questions. His answer to the question was no, and the incident somewhat dampened Obama’s enthusiasm for consulting the public—if only because in cyberspace “the public” happens to be whoever has the most Facebook friends and can direct them to a given poll.
Online town halls aside, there is a vibrant debate about the Internet’s impact on the health of democratic institutions. In most contexts, transparency is helpful, but, at the same time, it can also be quite costly. Even seasoned advocates for Internet-based transparency like Lawrence Lessig are beginning to sound much more cautious on the subject. Letting voters rank various government services may inadvertently foster an even greater cynicism and become a political liability. As Archon Fung, a professor of government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, notes, one unfortunate consequence of excessive government transparency may be simply to “further de-legitimize government, because what the transparency system is doing is helping people catch government making mistakes.... [It] is like creating a big Amazon rating system for government that only allows one- or two-star ratings.”
Politicians, on the other hand, may find it harder to make independent decisions without thinking about what would happen when all their memos and lunch schedules make it online. But even if they do, voters may draw the wrong conclusions, as Lessig pointed out in a trenchant 2009 article in the New Republic: that a senator has had a lunch meeting with a CEO does not mean that the senator’s vote that indirectly benefits the interests of that CEO was not driven by public interest. Of course, lobbyists and special interests are still usurping online spaces. Special interests have successfully explored the Internet to plant their own messages, micro-tailoring them to the newly segmented audiences and prompting the political commentator Robert Wright to complain that “technology has subverted the original idea of America,” adding that “the new information technology doesn’t just create generation-3.0