The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [169]
When technological fixes fail, their proponents are usually quick to suggest another, more effective technological fix as a remedy—and fight fire with fire. That is, they want to fight technology’s problems with even more technology. This explains why we fight climate change by driving cars that are more fuel-efficient and protect ourselves from Internet surveillance by relying on tools that encrypt our messages and conceal our identity. Often this only aggravates the situation, as it precludes a more rational and comprehensive discussion about the root causes of a problem, pushing us to deal with highly visible and inconsequential symptoms that can be cured on the cheap instead. This creates a never-ending and extremely expensive cat-and-mouse game in which, as the problem gets worse, the public is forced to fund even newer, more powerful tools to address it. Thus we avoid the search for a more effective nontechnological solution that, while being more expensive (politically or financially) in the short-term, could end the problem once and for all. We should resist this temptation to fix technology’s excesses by applying even more technology to them.
How, for example, do most Western governments and foundations choose to fight Internet censorship by authoritarian governments? Usually by funding and promoting technology that helps circumvent it. This may be an appropriate solution for some countries—think, for example, of North Korea, where Western governments have very little diplomatic and political leverage—but this is not necessarily the best approach to handle countries that are nominally Western allies.
In such cases, a nearly exclusive focus on fighting censorship with anticensorship tools distracts policymakers from addressing the root causes of censorship, which most often have to do with excessive restrictions that oppressive governments place on free speech. The easy availability of circumvention technology should not preclude policymakers from more ambitious—and ultimately more effective—ways of engagement. Otherwise, both Western and authoritarian governments get a free pass. Democratic leaders pretend that they are once again heroically destroying the Berlin Wall, while their authoritarian counterparts are happy to play along, for they have found other effective ways to control the Internet.
In an ideal world, the Western campaign to end Internet censorship in Tunisia or Kazakhstan would primarily revolve around exerting political pressure on their West-friendly authoritarian rulers and would deal with the offline world of newspapers and magazines as well. In many of these countries, muzzling journalists would continue to be the dominant tactic of suppressing dissent until, at least, more of their citizens get online and start using it for more activities than just using email or chatting with their relatives abroad. Allowing a handful of bloggers in Tajikistan to circumvent the government’s system of Internet controls means little when the vast majority of the population get their news from radio and television.
Except for his ruminations about hydrogen bombs and war, Weinberg did not discuss how technological fixes might affect foreign policy. Nevertheless, one can still trace how a tendency to frame foreign policy problems in terms of technological fixes has affected Western thinking about authoritarian rule and the role that the Internet can play in undermining it. One of the most peculiar features of Weinberg’s argument was his belief that the easy availability of clear-cut technological solutions can help policymakers better grasp and identify the problems they face. “The [social] problems are, in a way, harder to identify just because their solutions are never clear-cut,” wrote Weinberg. “By contrast, the availability of a crisp and beautiful technological solution often helps focus on the problem to which the new technology is the solution.”
In other words, just because policymakers have “a crisp and beautiful technological solution” to break through firewalls,