The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [174]
More than just politics lies beyond the scope of technological analysis; human nature is also outside its grasp. Proclaiming that societies have entered a new age and embraced a new economy does not automatically make human nature any more malleable, nor does it necessarily lead to universal respect for humanist values. People still lust for power and recognition, regardless of whether they accumulate it by running for office or collecting Facebook friends. As James Carey, the Columbia University media scholar, put it: “The ‘new’ man and woman of the ‘new age’ strikes one as the same mixture of greed, pride, arrogance and hostility that we encounter in both history and experience.” Technology changes all the time; human nature hardly ever.
The fact that do-gooders usually mean well does not mitigate the disastrous consequences that follow from their inability (or just sheer lack of ambition) to engage with broader social and political dimensions of technology. As the German psychologist Dietrich Dörner observed in The Logic of Failure, his masterful account of how decision-makers’ ingrained psychological biases could aggravate existing problems and blind them to the far more detrimental consequences of proposed solutions, “it’s far from clear whether ‘good intentions plus stupidity’ or ‘evil intentions plus intelligence’ have wrought more harm in the world.” In reality, the fact that we mean well should only give us extra reasons for scrupulous self-retrospection, for, according to Dörner, “incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions.”
After Utopia: The Cyber-Realist Manifesto
A few months after Hillary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom, Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a widely respected expert on Internet censorship, penned a poignant essay titled “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention,” one of the first serious attempts to grapple with the policy implications of Washington’s new favorite buzzword. In it, Zuckerman made an important argument that building tools to break through authoritarian firewalls wouldn’t be enough, because there are too many Internet users in China to make it affordable and too many nontechnological barriers to freedom of expression on the Web. “We can’t circumvent our way around censorship.... The danger in heeding Secretary Clinton’s call is that we increase our speed, marching in the wrong direction,” he wrote.
His own contribution to the debate was to elucidate several theories that may help policymakers better understand how the Internet can nudge authoritarian societies toward democratization. “To figure out how to promote internet freedom, I believe we need to start addressing the question: ‘How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?’” wrote Zuckerman. He listed three good potential answers. One such theory states that providing access to suppressed information may eventually push people to change opinion of their governments, precipitating a revolution. Another one posits that if citizens have access to various social networking sites and communication tools like Skype, they are able to better plan and organize their antigovernment activity. A third theory predicts that by providing a rhetorical space where different ideas can be debated, the Internet will gradually empower a new generation of leaders with a more modern set of demands.
As Zuckerman correctly points out, all of these theories have some