The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [148]
Not asking those questions would also prevent us from identifying the political consequences of such democratization of access to technology. Only irresponsible pundits would advocate democratizing access to guns in failed states. But the Internet, of course, has so many positive uses—some of which promote freedom of expression—that the gun analogy is rarely invoked by anyone. The good uses, however, do not always cancel out all the bad ones; if guns could also be used as megaphones, they would still make good targets for regulation. The danger is that the colorful banner of Internet freedom may further conceal the fact that the Internet is much more than the megaphone for democratic speech, that its other uses can be extremely antidemocratic in nature, and that without addressing those uses the very project of democracy promotion might be in great danger. The first prerequisite to getting Internet freedom policy right is convincing its greatest advocates that the Internet is more important and disruptive than they have previously theorized.
Why Rational Politics Doesn’t Fit a Hundred Forty Characters
As the Internet mediates more and more of our foreign policy, we are poised to surrender more and more control over it. Of course, the era when diplomats could take the time to formulate deep and extremely careful responses to events was already over with the arrival of the telegraph, which all but killed the autonomy of the foreign corps. As far as thoughtful foreign policy is concerned, it’s all been downhill from there. It’s hardly surprising that John Herz, the noted theorist of international relations, observed in 1976 that “where formerly more leisurely but also cooler and more thoroughly thought-out action was possible, one now must act or react immediately.”
The age of Internet politics deprives the diplomats of more than just autonomy. It’s also the end of rational policymaking, as policymakers are bombarded with information they cannot process, while a digitally mobilized global public demands an immediate response. Let’s not kid ourselves: Policymakers cannot craft effective policies under the influence of blood-curling videos of Iranian protesters dying on the pavement.
By 1992 George Kennan, the don of American diplomacy and author of the famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, which shaped much of American thinking during the Cold War and helped to articulate the policy of containment, had come to believe that the media killed America’s ability to develop rational foreign policy. Back then viral political videos were still the bread and butter of network television. After he watched the gruesome footage of several dead U.S. Army rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu on CNN, Kennan made the following bitter note in his diary, soon republished as an op-ed in the New York Times: “If American policy from here on out ... is to be controlled by popular emotional impulses, and particularly ones invoked by the commercial television industry, then there is no place—not only for myself but for what have traditionally been regarded as the responsible deliberative organs of our government, in both executive and legislative branches.” Kennan’s words were soon seconded by Thomas Keenan, the director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, who believes that “the rational consideration of information, with a view to grounding what one does in what one knows, now seems overtaken and displaced by emotion, and responses are now somehow controlled or, better, remote-controlled by television images.”
Now that television images have been superseded by YouTube videos and angry tweets, the threshold of intervention has dropped even lower. All it took to get the U.S. State Department to ask Twitter to put off their maintenance was a high number of tweets of highly dubious provenance. When the whole world expects us to react immediately