The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [145]
Perhaps, the freedom to connect, at least in its current somewhat abstract interpretation, would be a great policy priority in a democratic paradise, where citizens have long forgotten about hate, culture wars, and ethnic prejudice. But such an oasis of tolerance simply does not exist. Even in Switzerland, commonly held up as a paragon of decentralized democratic decision making and mutual respect, the freedom to connect means that a rather small and marginalized fraction of the country’s population managed to tap the power of the Internet to mobilize their fellow citizens to ban building new minarets in the country. The movement was spearheaded by right-wing blogs and various groups on social networking sites (many of them featuring extremely graphic posters—or “political Molotov cocktails,” as Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times described them—suggesting Muslims are threatening Switzerland, including one that showed minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles), and even peace-loving Swiss voters could not resist succumbing to the populist networked discourse. Never underestimate the power of Twitter and Photoshop in the hands of people mobilized by prejudice.
While Internet enthusiasts like to quote the optimistic global village reductionism of Marshall McLuhan, whom Wired magazine has chosen as its patron saint, few of them have much use for McLuhan’s darker reductionism, like this gem from 1964: “That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and the public-address system.” As usual, McLuhan was overstating the case, but we certainly do not want to discover that our overly optimistic rhetoric about the freedom to connect has deprived us of the ability to fix the inevitable negative consequences that such freedom produces. Some networks are good; some are bad. But all networks require a thorough ethical investigation. Promoting Internet freedom must include measures to mitigate the negative side effects of increased interconnectedness.
Do Weak States Need Powerful Gadgets?
All the recent chatter about how the Internet is breaking down institutions, barriers, and intermediaries can make us oblivious to the fact that strong and well-functioning institutions, especially governments, are essential to the preservation of freedom. Even if we assume that the Internet may facilitate the toppling of authoritarian regimes, it does not necessarily follow that it would also facilitate the consolidation of democracy. If anything, the fact that various antidemocratic forces—including extremists, nationalists, and former elites—have suddenly gained a new platform to mobilize and spread their gospel suggests that the consolidation of democracy may become harder rather than easier.
Concerns that the information revolution will weaken the nation state are not new. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Pulitzer-winning historian who advised John F. Kennedy, foresaw where increasing computerization might lead, if left unchecked, when he wrote in 1997: “The computer turns the untrammeled market into a global juggernaut crashing across frontiers, enfeebling national powers of taxation and regulation, undercutting national management of interest rates and exchanges rates, widening disparities of wealth within and between nations, dragging down labor standards, degrading the environment, denying nations the shaping of their own economic destiny, accountable to no one, creating a world economy without a world polity.” Fortunately, things haven’t proved as dramatic as he expected,