The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [176]
Instead of trying to build a new shiny pillar to foreign policy, cyber-realists would struggle to find space for the Internet in existing pillars, not least on the desks of regional officers who are already highly sensitive to the political context in which they operate. Instead of centralizing decision making about the Internet in the hands of a select few digerati who know the world of Web 2.0 start-ups but are completely lost in the world of Chinese or Iranian politics, cyber-realists would defy any such attempts at centralization, placing as much responsibility for Internet policy on the shoulders of those who are tasked with crafting and executing regional policy.
Instead of asking the highly general, abstract, and timeless question of “How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?” they would ask “How do we think the Internet is affecting our existing policies on country X?” Instead of operating in the realm of the utopian and the ahistorical, impervious to the ways in which developments in domestic and foreign policies intersect, cyber-realists would be constantly searching for highly sensitive points of interaction between the two. They would be able to articulate in concrete rather than abstract terms how specific domestic policies might impede objectives on the foreign policy front. Nor would they have much tolerance for a black-and-white color scheme. As such, while they would understand the limitations of doing politics online, they wouldn’t label all Internet activism as either useful or harmful based solely on its outputs, its inputs, or its objectives. Instead, they would evaluate the desirability of promoting such activism in accordance with their existing policy objectives.
Cyber-realists wouldn’t search for technological solutions to problems that are political in nature, and they wouldn’t pretend that such solutions are even possible. Nor would they give the false impression that on the Internet concerns over freedom of expression trump those over energy supplies, when this is clearly not the case. Such acknowledgments would only be factual rather than normative statements—it may well be that concerns over freedom of expression should be more important than concerns over energy supplies—but cyber-realists simply would not accept that any such radical shifts in the value system of the entire policy apparatus could or should happen under the pressure of the Internet alone.
Now would cyber-realists search for a silver bullet that could destroy authoritarianism—or even the next-to-silver-bullet, for the utopian dreams that such a bullet can even exist would have no place in their conception of politics. Instead, cyber-realists would focus on optimizing their own decision-making and learning processes, hoping that the right mix of bureaucratic checks and balances, combined with the appropriate incentive structure, would identify wicked problems before they are misdiagnosed as tame ones, as well as reveal how a particular solution to an Internet problem might disrupt solutions to other, non-Internet problems.
Most important, cyber-realists wouldn’t allow themselves to get dragged into the highly abstract and high-pitched debates about whether the Internet undermines or strengthens democracy. Instead, they would accept that the Internet is poised to produce different policy outcomes in different environments and that a policymaker’s chief objective is not to produce a thorough philosophical account of the Internet’s impact on society at large but, rather, to make the Internet an ally in achieving specific policy objectives.
Cyber-realists