The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [147]
The only thing worse than an authoritarian state is a failed one. The fact that the Internet empowers and amplifies so many forces that impinge on citizen’s rights and hurt various minorities is likely to result in more aggressive public demands for a stronger state to protect citizens from the lawlessness of cyberspace. As child pornographers, criminal gangs, nationalists, and terrorists use the Internet to cause more and more harm, the public’s patience will sooner or later run out. When Chinese netizens find themselves targets of attacks by “human flesh search engines,” they are not waiting for Robin Hood to come and protect them. They expect their otherwise authoritarian government to draft adequate privacy laws and enforce them. Similarly, when corrupt Russian police officers leak databases containing the personal details of many citizens, including their passport details and cell phone numbers, and these databases resurface on commercial Internet sites, it hardly makes Russians celebrate the virtues of limited government. Multiply the power of the Internet by the incompetence of a weakened state, and what you get is a lot of anarchy and injustice. The reason why so many otherwise astute observers see democracy where there is none is that they confuse the democratization of access to tools with the democratization of society. But one does not necessarily lead to the other, especially in environments where governments are too weak, too distracted, or too unwilling to mitigate the consequences of the democratization of tool access. More and cheaper tools in the wrong hands can result in less, not more, democracy.
It’s much like the perpetual debate about blogging versus journalism. Today anyone can blog because the tools for producing and disseminating information are cheap. Yet giving everyone a blog will not by itself increase the health of modern-day Western democracy; in fact, the possible side effects—the disappearance of watchdogs, the end of serendipitous news discovery, the further polarization of society—may not be the price worth paying for the still unclear virtues of the blogging revolution. (This does not mean, of course, that a set of smart policies—implemented by the government or private actors—won’t help to address those problems.) Why should it be different with the Internet and politics? For all we know, many social ills may have become considerably worse since the dawn of social media. We need to start looking at the totality of side effects, not just at the fact that the costs of being a political activist have fallen so dramatically.
In debunking the “more access to technology = more democracy” fallacy, Gerald Doppelt, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego, suggests some further issues we need to ponder. “In order to evaluate the impact of any particular case of technical politics on the democratization of technology and society,” writes Doppelt, “we need to ask who is this group of users challenging technology, where do they stand in society, what have they been denied, and what is the ethical significance of the technical change they seek for democratic ideals?” Without asking those questions, even the sharpest observers of technology will keep circling around the paradoxical conclusion that the blogging Al-Qaeda is good for democracy, because blogs have opened up new and cheap vistas for public participation. Any theory of democracy that doesn’t go beyond the cost of mobilization as its