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By Root 1831 0

intellectual merit. The additional assumptions that he makes, either explicitly or implicitly, is that the American government has a separate pot of money to spend on Internet freedom issues; that most of this money would invariably go to fund technological rather than political solutions; and that the best thing to do is to prioritize which tools are needed the most. Zuckerman’s suggestion, then, is that policymakers first need to figure out which theory is to guide their efforts in online space and then rely on it to allocate their resources. Thus, if they expect to enact change by mobilizing citizens to rise up against their governments, they need to ensure that tools like Twitter and Facebook are widely available and resistant to both attempts to block access to them and DDoS attacks. In contrast, if they stick to the “liberated by facts” theory, they would need to prioritize access to blogs of the opposition as well as websites like Wikipedia, BBC News, and so forth.

Instead of formulating a better theory to complement Zuckerman’s, one needs to ponder what breeds demand for such theories in the first place. While it is hard to disagree with his warning that, in their pursuit of Internet freedom nirvana, policymakers may be speeding up in the wrong direction, Zuckerman’s neo-Weinbergian philosophy of action seems much more ambiguous. It is founded on a belief that once policymakers understand the “logic” of the Internet, which in Zuckerman’s interpretation, inherently favors those challenging autocracy and power but in ways that we may not yet understand, they will be able to formulate smarter Internet policies and can then pursue a host of technological solutions to accomplish the objectives of those policies. Thus, from Zuckerman’s perspective, it’s important to articulate numerous theories by which the Internet may be transforming autocracies and then act on those that best match the empirical reality.

In the meantime, the mental gymnastics of proposing and evaluating theories may also add meaning to the term “Internet freedom,” which even Zuckerman acknowledges to be currently empty. It’s this last point that is most troubling: Even though Zuckerman agrees that Internet freedom offers a poor foundation for effective foreign policy, he is nevertheless eager to propose—somewhat cynically—all sorts of fixes to make this foundation last for a year or two longer than it might otherwise. Unfortunately, those rare intellectuals who do know a great deal about both the Internet and the rest of the world—Zuckerman is also an Africa expert—prefer to spend their time seeking marginal improvements to wrong-headed policies, unable or unwilling to see through the pernicious Internet-centrism that permeates them and to reject their very foundation. (The situation is certainly not helped by the fact that the State Department funds some of Zuckerman’s projects at Harvard, as he himself acknowledged in the essay.)

But an even greater problem with Zuckerman’s approach is that, should the “logic” of the Internet defy his expectations and prove elusive, nonexistent, or inherently antidemocratic, the rest of the proposed course of action also falls apart and is at best irrelevant and at worst deceptive. That the Internet may also be strengthening rather than undermining authoritarian regimes; that placing it at the cornerstone of foreign policy helps Internet companies deflect the criticism they so justly deserve; that a dedication to the highly abstract goal of promoting Internet freedom complicates a thorough assessment of other parts of foreign and domestic policies—these are not the kind of insights one is likely to gain while groping for a theory to justify one’s own penchant for cyber-utopianism or Internet-centrism. As a result, many of these concerns barely register when future policies are being crafted.

The way forward is not to keep coming up with new theories until they match one’s existing biases about what the logic of the Internet is or should be like. Instead, one should seek to come up with a philosophy of action to