The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [154]
The global village that the telegraph built was not without its flaws and exploitations. At least one contemporary observer of Britain’s colonial expansion into India observed that “the unity of feeling and of action which constitutes imperialism would scarcely have been possible without the telegraph.” Thomas Misa, a historian of technology at the University of Minnesota, notes that “telegraph lines were so important for imperial communication that in India they were built in advance of railway lines.” Many other technological innovations beyond the telegraph contributed to this expansionism. Utopian accounts of technology’s liberating role in human history rarely acknowledge the fact that it was the discovery of quinine, which helped to fight malaria, reducing the risk of endemic tropical disease, that eliminated one major barrier to colonialism, or that the invention of printing helped to forge a common Spanish identity and pushed the Spaniards to colonize Latin America.
When the telegraph failed to produce the desired social effects, everyone’s attention turned to the airplane. Joseph Corn describes the collective exaltation that surrounded the advent of the airplane in his 2002 book The Winged Gospel. According to Corn, in the 1920s and much of the 1930s most people “expected the airplane to foster democracy, equality, and freedom, to improve public taste and spread culture, to purge the world of war and violence; and even to give rise to a new kind of human being.” One observer at the time, apparently oblivious to the economic forces of global capitalism, mused that airplanes opened up “the realm of absolute liberty; no tracks, no franchises, no need of thousands of employees to add to the cost,” while in 1915 the editor of Flying magazine—the Wired of its day—enthusiastically proclaimed that the First World War had to be “the last great war in history,” because “in less than another decade,” the airplane would have eliminated the factors responsible for wars and ushered in a “new period in human relations” (apparently, Adolf Hitler was not a subscriber to Flying). As much as one could speak of utopian airplane-centrism of the 1910s, this was it.
But it was the invention of radio that produced the greatest number of unfulfilled expectations. Its pioneers did their share to overhype the democratization potential of their invention. Guglielmo Marconi, one of the fathers of this revolutionary technology, believed that “the coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.” Gerald Swope, president of General Electric Company, one of the biggest commercial backers of radio at the time, was equally upbeat in 1921, hailing the technology as “a means for general and perpetual peace on earth.” Neither Marconi nor Swope could have foreseen that seven decades later two local radio stations would use the airwaves to heighten ethnic tensions, spread messages of hatred, and help fuel the Rwandan genocide.
When Twitter’s founders proclaim their site to be a “triumph of humanity,” as they did in 2009, the public should save its applause until assessing the possibility of a Twitter-fueled genocide sweeping through some distant foreign land, thousands of miles away from the Bay Area. Then and now, such declarations of technology’s benign