The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [137]
Political religion is also profiting from technology. In early 2010 Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that is surprisingly comfortable with modern technology, unveiled a Wiki-like site where anyone can help chart the movement’s history (the site was launched with 1,700 articles). The idea is to both produce a historical document and introduce young people, especially those who do not have access to the movement’s most important texts, to the movement’s key ideas. Hosted on a server in the United States, the site is considerably harder for the Egyptian authorities to shut down (as they already did with an earlier Brotherhood site that was hosted in Egypt).
As it turns out, the Internet has been reviving many of the religious and cultural practices that globalization was supposed to erode, if not eliminate altogether. Consider the case of Gokce, a small Turkish village near the country’s southern border with Syria. Even though polygamy was banned in Turkey in 1926, the practice still lives on in many rural areas, including Gokce. Until very recently Gokce’s lonely hearts searching for yet another wife had to hop on a bus and travel to Syria. Today most such “romantic” endeavors start online, thanks to Gokce’s first Internet café, which opened in 2008. “Everyone’s coming to the internet cafe now to find a wife. Sometimes, there’s no space to sit down,” the cafe’s owner told EurasiaNet. As a result, polygamy is on the rise, with brides from Morocco, who don’t need a visa to enter Turkey, being particularly popular. Instead of turning Gokce’s male residents into cosmopolitan defenders of women’s rights, the Internet has only entrenched their status as cosmopolitan polygamists. Likewise, while it’s tempting to believe that the introduction of mobile phones and text messaging technology into Saudi households may have afforded more privacy to women, in reality, the opposite may have happened, as husbands can now receive automated text messages whenever their wives leave the country.
Tweets will not dissolve all of our national, cultural, and religious differences; they may actually accentuate them. The cyber-utopian belief that the Internet would turn us into uber-tolerant citizens of the world, all too eager to put our vile prejudices on hold and open up our minds to what we see on our monitors, has proved to be unfounded. In most cases, the only people who still believe in the ideal of an electronic global village are those who would have become tolerant cosmopolitans even without the Internet: the globe-trotting intellectual elite. The regular folk don’t read sites like Global Voices, an aggregator of the most interesting blog posts from all over the world; instead, they are much more likely to use the Internet to rediscover their own culture—and, dare we say it, their own national bigotry.
The good news is that we are not rushing toward a globalized nirvana where everyone eats at MacDonald’s and watches the same Hollywood films, as feared by some early critics of globalization. The bad news is that, under the pressure of religious, nationalist, and cultural forces reignited by the Internet, global politics is poised to become even more complex, contentious, and fragmented. While many in the West view the Internet as offering an excellent opportunity to revive the least credible bits of modernization theory—the once popular belief that, with some assistance, all developing societies can reach a take-off point where they put their history, culture, and religion on hold and simply follow in the policy steps of more developed nations—such ideas don’t have much basis in reality.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood certainly does not perceive the Internet to be a tool of hyper-modernization, because they reject the very project of hyper-modernization, at least as it is being marketed by the neoliberal institutions that are propping up the Mubarak regime they oppose. And although others have doubts about their vision for