The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [141]
It’s not obvious what one should make of such online efforts. Nothing illegal was done. It is also hard to deny that such a campaign would have been difficult to mount before the advent of Web 2.0, if only because many such nationalistic movements were too disorganized and geographically dispersed. Those who care about promoting freedom and democracy in Russia today now have to fight not just the state but also various nonstate actors that, thanks to the Internet, have suddenly become overmobilized.
The problem is that the West began its quest for Internet freedom based on the mostly untested cyber-utopian assumption that more connections and more networks necessarily lead to more freedom or more democracy. In her Internet freedom address, Hillary Clinton spoke of the importance of promoting what she dubbed a “freedom to connect,” saying that it’s “like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate. Once you’re on the internet, you don’t need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society.” The U.S. State Department’s Alec Ross, one of the chief architects of Clinton’s Internet freedom policy, said that “the very existence of social networks is a net good.”
But are social networks really goods to be treasured in themselves? After all, the mafia, prostitution and gambling rings, and youth gangs are social networks, too, but no one would claim that their existence in the physical world is a net good or that it shouldn’t be regulated. Ever since Mitch Kapor, one of the founding fathers of cyber-utopianism, proclaimed that “life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community” in 1993, many policymakers have been under the impression that the only networks to find homes online would be those promoting peace and prosperity. But Kapor hasn’t read his Jefferson closely enough, for the latter was well aware of the antidemocratic spirit of many civil associations, writing that “the mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.” Jefferson, apparently, was not persuaded by the absolute goodness of the “smart mobs,” a fancy term to describe social groups that have been organized spontaneously, usually with the help of technology.
As Luke Allnut, an editor with Radio Free Europe, points out, “where the techno-utopianists are limited in their vision is that in this great mass of Internet users all capable of great things in the name of democracy, they see only a mirror image of themselves: progressive, philanthropic, cosmopolitan. They don’t see the neo-Nazis, pedophiles, or genocidal maniacs who have networked, grown, and prospered on the Internet.” The problem of treating all networks as good in themselves is that it allows policymakers to ignore their political and social effects, delaying effective response to their otherwise harmful activities. “Cooperation,” which seems to be the ultimate objective of Clinton’s network building, is too ambiguous of a term to build meaningful policy around.
A brief look at history—for example, at the politics of Weimar Germany, where increased civic engagement helped to delegitimize parliamentary democracy—would reveal that an increase in civic activity does not necessarily deepen democracy. American history in the post-Tocqueville era offers plenty of similar cues as well. The Ku Klux Klan was also a social network, after all. As Ariel Armony, a political scientist at Colby College