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By Root 1852 0

the future of Egypt and the Middle East in general, the Brothers have nothing against using modern tools like the Internet to achieve it. After all, modern technologies abet all revolutions, not just those that are decidedly pro-Western in character. Even such a devout conservative as Ayatollah Khomeini did not shy away from using audiotapes to distribute his sermons in the shah’s Iran. “We are struggling against autocracy, for democracy, by means of xeroxracy,” was one of the numerous technology-worshiping slogans adopted by the anti-shah intelligentsia in the late 1970s. Had Twitter been around at the time, the anti-shah demonstrators would surely be celebrating Twitterocracy. And even though the Islamic Republic did embrace many elements of modernity—cloning, a vibrant legal market in organ donations, string theory, to name just a few areas where contemporary Iran is far ahead of its peers in the Middle East—its politics and public life are still shaped by religious discourse. It’s quite likely that a large chunk of both the West’s funds and its attention will need to go toward mitigating the inevitable negative effects that Internet-powered religion will have on world affairs. This is not a moral evaluation of religion: It has proved to be good for democracy and freedom at some points in history, but history has also shown how pernicious its influence can be.

A commitment to Internet freedom—or a combination of its various elements—may be the right and inevitable moral choice the West needs to make (albeit with a thousand footnotes), but the West must also understand that a freer Internet, by its very nature, may significantly change the rest of the agenda, creating new problems and entrenching old ones. This doesn’t mean that the West should embark on an ambitious global censorship campaign against the Internet. Rather, different countries require a different combination of policies, some of them aimed at countering and mitigating the influence of religion and other cultural forces and some of them amplifying their influence.

Smallpox Strikes Back

Nationalism, too, is going through a major revival on the Web. Members of displaced nations can find each other online, and existing nationalist movements can delve into the freshly digitized national archives to produce their own version of history. New Internet services often open up new venues for contesting history. Nations are now arguing about whether Google Earth renders their borders in accordance with their wishes. Syria and Israel continue battling about how the contested Golan Heights territory should be listed in Facebook’s drop-down menus. Indian and Pakistan bloggers have been competing to mark parts of the contested territory of Kashmir as belonging to either of the two countries on Google Maps. The site had also been under attack for listing some Indian villages in the Arunachal Pradesh province, on the Indian-Chinese border, under Chinese names and as belonging to China. Cambodians, too, have been outraged by Google Earth’s decision to mark eleventh-century Preah Vihear temple, ownership of which was awarded to Cambodia in a 1962 court ruling, as part of Thailand.

But such fights over the proper marking of digital assets aside, has the Internet reduced our prejudices against other nations? Was Nicholas Negroponte, one of the intellectual fathers of cyber-utopianism, correct when he predicted in 1995 that “[on the Internet] there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox”? The evidence for such sweeping claims is thin. In fact, quite the opposite may have happened. Now that South Koreans can observe their old enemies from Japan through a 24/7 digital panopticon, they are waging cyber-wars over such petty disputes as figure skating. Many of the deeply rooted national prejudices cannot be cured by increased transparency alone; if anything, greater exposure may only heighten them. Ask Nigerians how they feel about the entire world believing them to be a nation of scammers who only use the Internet to inform us that a Nigerian chieftain