The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [168]
Another problem with technological fixes is that they usually rely on extremely sophisticated solutions that cannot be easily understood by laypeople. The claims of their advocates are, thus, almost impenetrable to external scrutiny, while their ambitious promise—the elimination of some deeply entrenched social ill—makes such scrutiny, even if it is possible, hard to mount. Not surprisingly, the dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation. It’s not by coincidence that those who are most vocal in proclaiming that the most burning problems of Internet freedom can be solved by breaking a number of firewalls happen to be the same people who develop and sell the technologies needed to break them. Obviously they have no incentive to point out that one needs to be fighting other, nontechnological problems or to disclose problems with their own technologies. The founders of Haystack rarely bothered to highlight the flaws in their own software—let alone disclose that it was still in the testing stage—and the media never bothered to ask. As the Haystack fiasco so clearly illustrates, even being able to ask the right technological questions requires a good grasp of the sociopolitical context in which a given technology is supposed to be used.
This points to another commonly overlooked problem: Our growing commitment to the instruments we use to implement “technological fixes” for what may be important global problems greatly restrains our ability to criticize those who own the rights to those fixes. Every new article or book about a Twitter Revolution is not a triumph of humanity; it is a triumph of Twitter’s marketing department. In fact, Silicon Valley’s marketing geniuses may have a strong interest in misleading the public about the similarity between the Cold War and today: The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe still enjoy a lot of goodwill with policymakers, and having Twitter and Facebook be seen as their digital equivalents doesn’t hurt their publicity.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Code
Perhaps most disturbingly, reframing social problems as a series of technological problems distracts policymakers from tackling problems that are nontechnological in nature and cannot be reframed. As the media keep trumping the role that mobile phones have played in fueling economic growth in Africa, policymakers cannot afford to forget that innovation by itself will not rid African nations of the culture of pervasive corruption. Such an achievement will require a great deal of political will. In its absence, even the fanciest technology would go to waste. The funds for the computerization of Sudan would remain unspent, and computers would remain untouched, as long as many of the region’s politicians are “more used to carrying AK-47s and staging ambushes than typing on laptops,” as a writer for the Financial Times so aptly put it.
On the contrary, when we introduce a multipurpose technology like a mobile phone into such settings, it can often have side effects that only aggravate existing social problems. Who could have predicted that, learning of the multiple money transfer opportunities offered by mobile banking, corrupt Kenyan police officers would demand that drivers now pay their bribes with much-easier-to-conceal transfers of air time rather than cash? In the absence of strong political and social institutions, technology may only precipitate the collapse of state power, but it is easy to lose sight of real-world dynamics when one is so enthralled by the supposed brilliance of a technological fix. Otherwise policymakers risk falling into unthinking admiration of technology as panacea, which the British architect Cedric Price once ridiculed by pondering, “Technology is the