The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [171]
Solutions to such problems are never true or false, like they are in chess, but rather good or bad. As such, there could never be a single “best” solution to a wicked problem, as “goodness” is too contentious of a term to satisfy everyone. Worse, there is no immediate or ultimate test for the effectiveness of such solutions, as their side effects may take time to surface. In addition, any such solution is also a one-shot operation. Since there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every trial counts. Unlike a lost chess game, which is seldom consequential for other games or non-chess-players, a failed solution to a wicked problem has long-term and largely unpredictable implications far beyond its original context. Every solution, as the authors put it, “leaves traces that cannot be undone.”
The essay contained more than a taxonomy of various planning problems. It also contained a valuable moral prescription: Rittel and Webber thought that the task of the planner was not to abandon the fight in disillusionment but to acknowledge its challenges and find ways to distinguish between tame and wicked problems, not least because it was “morally objectionable for the planner to treat a wicked problem as though it were a tame one.” They argued that the planner, unlike the scientist, has no right to be wrong: “In the world of planning ... the aim is not to find the truth, but to improve some characteristic of the world where people live. Planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate.” It’s a formidable moral imperative.
Even though Rittel and Webber wrote the essay with highly technical domestic policies in mind, anyone concerned with the future of democracy promotion and foreign policy in general would do well to heed their advice. Modern authoritarianism, by its very constitution, is a wicked, not a tame, problem. It cannot be “solved” or “engineered away” by a few lines of genius computer code or a stunning iPhone app. The greatest obstacle that Internet-centric initiatives like Internet freedom pose to this fight is that they misrepresent uber-wicked problems as tame ones. They thus allow policymakers to forget that the very act of choosing one solution over another is pregnant with political repercussions; it is not a mere chess game they are playing. But while it is hard to deny that wicked problems defy easy solutions, it doesn’t mean that some solutions wouldn’t be more effective (or at least less destructive) than others.
From this perspective, a “war on authoritarianism”—or its younger digital sibling, a “war for Internet freedom”—is as misguided as a “war on terror.” Not only does such terminology mask the wicked nature of many problems associated with authoritarianism, concealing a myriad of complex connections between them, it suggests—falsely—that such a war can be won if only enough resources are mobilized. Such aggrandizement is of little help to a policy planner, who instead should be trying to grasp how exactly particular wicked problems relate to their context and what may be done to isolate and tackle them while controlling for side effects. The overall push, thus, is away from the grandiose and the rhetorical—qualities inherent in highly ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom”—and toward the miniscule and the concrete.
Assuming that wicked problems lumped under the banner of Internet freedom could be reduced to tame ones won’t help either. Western policymakers can certainly work to undermine the information trinity of authoritarianism—propaganda, censorship, and surveillance—but they should not lose sight of the fact that all of them are so tightly interrelated that by fighting one pillar, they may end up strengthening the other two. And even their perception of this trinity may simply be a product of their own cognitive limitations, with their