The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [16]
By the end of 2009 cyber-utopianism reached new heights, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not object when Wired Italy (the Italian edition of the popular technology magazine) nominated the Internet for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, the result of a public campaign by a number of celebrities, ranging from Giorgio Armani to Shirin Ebadi, a previous winner of the Prize. (In 1991, Lennart Meri, the future president of Estonia, nominated Radio Free Europe for the same award for its role in helping to bring an end to the Soviet Union—another interesting parallel with the Cold War era.) Why did the Internet deserve the prize more than Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, who emerged as the eventual winner of the prize? Justifications given by an assortment of editors of various national editions of Wired magazine, the official printing organ of the Church of Cyber-Utopianism, are symptomatic of the kind of discourse that led American diplomats astray in Iran.
Riccardo Luna, the editor of the Italian edition, proposed that the Internet is a “first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and to propagate peace and democracy.” Chris Anderson, the editor of the original American edition, opined that while “a Twitter account may be no match for an AK-47 ... in the long term the keyboard is mightier than the sword.” David Rowan, the editor of the British edition, argued that the Internet “gave all of us the chance to take back the power from governments and multinationals. It made the world a totally transparent place.” And how can a totally transparent world fail to be a more democratic world as well?
Apparently, nothing bad ever happens on the Internet frequented by the editors of Wired; even spam could be viewed as the ultimate form of modern poetry. But refusing to acknowledge the Internet’s darker side is like visiting Berkeley, California, cyber-utopian headquarters, and concluding that this is how the rest of America lives as well: diverse, tolerant, sun-drenched, with plenty of organic food and nice wine, and with hordes of lifelong political activists fighting for causes that don’t even exist yet. But this is not how the rest of America lives, and this is certainly not how the rest of the world lives.
A further clarification might be in order at this point. The border between cyber-utopianism and cyber-naïveté is a blurry one. In fact, the reason why so many politicians and journalists believe in the power of the Internet is because they have not given this subject much thought. Their faith is not the result of a careful examination of how the Internet is being used by dictators or how it is changing the culture of resistance and dissent. On the contrary, most often it’s just unthinking acceptance of conventional wisdom, which posits that since authoritarian governments are censoring the Internet, they must be really afraid of it. Thus, according to this view, the very presence of a vibrant Internet culture greatly increases the odds that such regimes will collapse.
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Whatever one calls it, this belief in the democratizing power of the Web ruins the public’s ability to assess future and existing policies, not least because it overstates the positive role that corporations play in democratizing the world without subjecting them to the scrutiny they so justly deserve. Such cyber-utopian propensity to only see the bright side was on full display in early 2010, as Google announced it was pulling out of China, fed up with the growing censorship demands of the Chinese government and mysterious cyber-attacks on its intellectual property. But what should have been treated as a purely rational business decision was lauded as a bold move to support “human rights”; that Google did not mind operating in China for more than four years prior to the pull-out was lost on most commentators.
Writing in Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, a prominent American journalist and publisher,