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would acknowledge that by continuing to flirt with Internet-centrism and cyber-utopianism, policymakers are playing a risky game. Not only do they squander plenty of small-scale opportunities for democratization that the Internet has to offer because they look from too distant a perspective, but they also inadvertently embolden dictators and turn everyone who uses the Internet in authoritarian states into unwilling prisoners. Cyber-realists would argue that this is a terribly expensive and ineffective way to promote democracy; worse, it threatens to corrupt or crowd out cheaper and more effective alternatives. For them, the promotion of democracy would be too important an activity to run it out of a Silicon Valley lab with a reputation for exotic experiments. Above all, cyber-realists would believe that a world made of bytes may defy the law of gravity but absolutely nothing dictates that it should also defy the law of reason.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I won’t be overstating the case if I say that this book would not have been possible without the generous support—moral, intellectual, financial—of the Open Society Foundations. I was lucky to get an OSF scholarship very early on (I was still in a Belarusian high school) that allowed me to pursue my undergraduate studies abroad. Were it not for this scholarship, I may have well ended up on the wrong side of the digital barricades.

Later, some of my work at Transitions Online was also funded by grants from OSF’s Information Program. Even if some of our projects at Transitions were somewhat cyber-utopian in spirit, OSF was always the funder eager to take the most risks and take the most unconventional approaches. That’s more than an NGO can usually wish for!

After leaving Transitions, I was lucky to be invited to join the board of OSF’s Information Program, which gave me a great opportunity to think about the numerous political and social implications of the Internet from a philanthropic perspective. There is hardly a better gig in the world to see just how important and political technology is—and how getting it right matters.

Most important, being one of the first recipients of an Open Society fellowship, I tremendously benefited from the necessary support and flexibility to conduct much of the research for this book. A list of all my friends at the extended OSF family is too long to include here, but I’d like to thank Darius Cuplinskas, Janet Haven, Stephen Hubbell, Sasha Post, Bipasha Ray, Istvan Rev, Anthony Richter, Laura Silber, Ethan Zuckerman, and especially Leonard Benardo for all their help as well as their willingness to tolerate my contrarian streak.

Between September 2009 and May 2010 I spent a wonderful academic year at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study for Diplomacy. This was a charming experience, not least because Charles Dolgas, Paula Newberg, and Jim Seevers helped to make it so by providing me with a superb intellectual environment to work in. I’d also like to thank Tony Arendt for letting me test some of my ideas on Georgetown graduate students in my class about the Internet and democracy.

My students deserve a dedicated thanks of their own. They were a very open-minded bunch who helped to challenge my arguments in every possible way. In addition, Chanan Weissman and Tracy Huang provided me with excellent research assistance. I’d also like to thank the folks at Yahoo’s Business and Human Rights Program, who made my stay at Georgetown possible. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by their genuine dedication to intellectual inquiry into the politics of the Internet, even if that inquiry often clashed with their own interests.

I’d also like to thank Joshua Cohen for first inviting me to write for Boston Review, where I published several essays about the Internet, and then for extending an invitation to spend the 2010-2011 year at Stanford. Andres Martinez and Steve Coll at the New American Foundation were also kind enough not only to award me a fellowship for the same period but to let me spend the bulk of my fellowship time at Stanford, an extremely