The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [152]
Or take the Burakumin, who are one of Japan’s largest social minorities, descending from outcast communities of the feudal era. Since the seventeenth century, members of the one-million-strong Burakumin population have been living outside of Japan’s rigid caste system, with other castes pretending that the Burakumin do not exist. When a group of Japanese cartographic enthusiasts overlaid the old maps of the Burakumin communities with Google’s satellite images of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, it first seemed like a good idea. Previously there had been little effort to preserve Burakumin heritage online. Within days, however, a bevy of Japanese nationalists got excited about finally finding the exact locations of the much-hated Burakumin houses, and the Japanese blogosphere was abuzz with discussions of pogroms. After intense pressure from Japanese antidiscrimination NGOs, Google asked the owners of the maps to at least remove the legend that identified the Burakumin ghettos as “scum towns.”
Meanwhile, South Korea’s xenophobic vigilantes, who formed a group known as Anti-English Spectrum, have been scouring social networking sites searching for personal details of foreigners who come to the country to teach English, in a desperate effort to find any potential misbehavior, so that the foreigners can be thrown out of the country.
Similarly, while China’s notorious “human flesh search engines” have mostly been mentioned in the Western media for their courageous online pursuits of corrupt bureaucrats, they also have a darker side. In fact, they have a history of attacking people who voice unpopular political positions (urging respect for ethnic minorities) or simply behaving slightly outside of the accepted norm (being unfaithful to one’s spouse). Grace Wang, a student at Duke University, was one of the most famous targets of the angry “human flesh search engines” in 2008, at the height of tensions between China and the West right before the Beijing Olympics. After she urged her fellow Chinese netizens to try to better understand those in Tibet, she had to deal with a wave of personal attacks, with someone even posting directions to her parents’ house on a popular Chinese site. (Her family had to go into hiding.)
It may be that what we gain in the ability to network and communicate, we lose in the inevitable empowerment of angry online mobs, who are well-trained to throw “data grenades” at their victims. This may be an acceptable consequence of promoting Internet freedom, but we’d better plan ahead and think of ways in which we can protect the victims. It’s irresponsible to put people’s lives on the line while hoping we can deal at some later point with the consequences of opening up all the networks and databases.
That the excess of data can pose a danger to freedom and democracy as significant as (if not more significant than) the lack of data has mostly been lost on those cheerleading for Internet freedom. This is hardly surprising, for this may not be such an acute problem in liberal democracies, where the dominant pluralist ideology, growing multiculturalism, and a strong rule of law mitigate the consequences of the data deluge.
But most authoritarian or even transitional states do not have that luxury. Hoping that simply opening up all the networks and uploading all the documents would make a transition to democracy easier or more likely is just an illusion. If the sad experience of the 1990s has taught us anything, it’s that successful transitions require a strong state and a relatively orderly public life. The Internet, so far, has posed a major threat to both.
chapter ten
Making History (More Than a Browser Menu)
In 1996, when a group of high-profile digerati took to the pages of Wired magazine and proclaimed that the “public square of the past” was being replaced by the Internet, a technology that “enables average citizens to participate in national discourse, publish a newspaper, distribute an electronic pamphlet to the world ... while simultaneously protecting