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By Root 1750 0

in Maine, puts it, “civic involvement may ... be linked to undemocratic outcomes in state and society, the presence of a ‘vital society’ may fail to prevent outcomes inimical to democracy, or it may contribute to such results.” It’s political and economic factors, rather than the ease of forming associations, that primarily set the tone and the vector in which social networks contribute to democratization; one would be naïve to believe that such factors would always favor democracy. For example, if online social networking tools end up overempowering various nationalist elements within China, it is quite obvious that the latter’s influence on the direction of China’s foreign policy will increase as well. Given the rather peculiar relationship between nationalism, foreign policy, and government legitimacy in China, such developments may not necessarily be particularly conducive to democratization, especially if they lead to more confrontations with Taiwan or Japan.

Even Manuel Castells, a prominent Spanish sociologist and one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the information society, has not been sold on the idea of just “letting a thousand networks bloom.” “The Internet is indeed a technology of freedom,” writes Castells, “but it can make the powerful free to oppress the uninformed” and “lead to the exclusion of the devalued by the conquerors of value.” Robert Putnam, the famed American political theorist who lamented the sad state of social capital in America in his best-selling Bowling Alone, also cautioned against the “kumbaja interpretation of social capital.” “Networks and associated norms of reciprocity are generally good for those inside the network,” he wrote, “but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive.” From the perspective of American foreign policy, social networks may, indeed, be net goods, but only as long as they don’t include anyone hiding in the caves of Waziristan. When senator after senator deplores the fact that YouTube has become a second home to Islamic terrorists, they hardly sound like absolute believers in the inherent democratic nature of the networked world.

One can’t just limit the freedom to connect to the pro-Western nodes of the Web, and everyone—including plenty of anti-Western nodes—stands to profit from the complex nature of the Internet. When it comes to democracy promotion, one major problem with a networked society is that it has also suddenly overempowered those who oppose the very process of democratization, be they the church, former communists, or fringe political movements. As a result, it has become difficult to focus on getting things done, for it’s not immediately obvious if the new, networked threats to democracy are more ominous than the ones the West originally thought to fight. Have the nonstate enemies of democracy been empowered to a greater degree than the previous enemy (i.e., the monolith authoritarian state) has been disempowered? It certainly seems like a plausible scenario, at least in some cases; to assume anything otherwise is to cling to an outdated conception of power that is incompatible with the networked nature of the modern world. “People routinely praise the Internet for its decentralizing tendencies. Decentralization and diffusion of power, however, is not the same thing as less power exercised over human beings. Nor is it the same thing as democracy.... The fact that no one is in charge does not mean that everyone is free,” writes Jack Balkin of Yale Law School. The authoritarian lion may be dead, but now there are hundreds of hungry hyenas swirling around the body.

Safe to Disconnect

Even worse, the supposed lawlessness and networked anarchy enabled by the Internet have resulted in greater social pressure to tame the Web. In a sense, the more important the Internet becomes, the greater the onus to rein in its externalities. Promoting the freedom to connect will be a tricky proposal to sell to voters, many of whom actually want the government to promote the freedom to disconnect—at least for particular political