The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [164]
As far as the Internet is concerned, scholarship has so far moved in the opposite direction. Academic centers dedicated to the study of the Internet—the intellectual bulwarks of Internet-centrism—keep proliferating on university campuses and, in the process, contribute to its further reification and decontextualization. That virtually any newspaper or magazine today boasts of interviews with “Internet gurus” is a rather troubling sign, for however deep their knowledge of the architecture of the Internet and its diverse and playful culture, it doesn’t make up for their inadequate understanding of how societies, let alone non-Western societies, function. It’s a sign of how deeply Internet-centrism has corrupted the public discourse that people who have a rather cursory knowledge of modern Iran have become the go-to sources on Iran’s Twitter Revolution, as if a close look at all Iran-related tweets could somehow open a larger window on the politics of this extremely complicated country than the careful scholarly study of its history.
Why Technologies Are Never Neutral
If technological determinism is dangerous, so is its opposite: a bland refusal to see that certain technologies, by their very constitution, are more likely to produce certain social and political outcomes than other technologies, once embedded into enabling social environments. In fact, there is no misconception more banal, ubiquitous, and profoundly misleading than “technology is neutral.” It all depends, we are often told, on how one decides to use a certain tool: A knife can be used to kill somebody, but it can also be used to carve wood.
The neutrality of technology is a deep-rooted theme in the intellectual history of Western civilization. Boccaccio raised some interesting questions about it in The Decameron back in the mid-fourteenth century. “Who doesn’t know what a boon wine is to the healthy ... and how dangerous to the sick? Are we to say, then, that wine is bad simply because it is injurious to the fevered? ... Weapons safeguard the welfare of those who desire to live in peace; nevertheless; they often shed blood, not through any evil inherent in them, but through the wickedness of the men who use them to unworthy ends.”
The neutrality of the Internet is frequently invoked in the context of democratization as well. “Technology is merely a tool, open to both noble and nefarious purposes. Just as radio and TV could be vehicles of information pluralism and rational debate, so they could also be commandeered by totalitarian regimes for fanatical mobilization and total state control,” writes Hoover Institution’s Larry Diamond. Neutrality-speak crept into Hillary Clinton’s Internet freedom speech as well, when she noted that “just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns and nuclear energy can power a city or destroy it, modern information networks and the technologies they support can be harnessed for good or ill.” The most interesting thing about Clinton’s analogy between the Internet and nuclear energy is that it suggests that there needs to be more not less oversight and control over the Internet. No one exactly advocates that nuclear plants should be run as their proprietors wish; the notion of “nuclear freedom” as a means of liberating the world sounds rather absurd.
Product designers like to think of tools as having certain perceived qualities. Usually called “affordances,” these qualities suggest—rather than dictate—how tools are to be used. A chair may have the affordance for sitting, but it may also have the affordance for