The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [20]
From the perspective of authoritarian governments, the costs of exploiting Western follies have significantly decreased as well. Compromising the security of just one digital activist can mean compromising the security—names, faces, email addresses—of everyone that individual knows. Digitization of information has also led to its immense centralization: One stolen password now opens data doors that used not to exist (just how many different kinds of data—not to mention people—would your email password give access to, if compromised?).
Unbridled cyber-utopianism is an expensive ideology to maintain because authoritarian governments don’t stand still and there are absolutely no guarantees they won’t find a way to turn the Internet into a powerful tool of oppression. If, on closer examination, it turns out that the Internet has also empowered the secret police, the censors, and the propaganda offices of a modern authoritarian regime, it’s quite likely that the process of democratization will become harder, not easier. Similarly, if the Internet has dampened the level of antigovernment sentiment—because people have acquired access to cheap and almost infinite digital entertainment or because they feel they need the government to protect them from the lawlessness of cyberspace—it certainly gives the regime yet another source of legitimacy. If the Internet is reshaping the very nature and culture of antigovernment resistance and dissent, shifting it away from real-world practices and toward anonymous virtual spaces, it will also have significant consequences for the scale and tempo of the protest movement, not all of them positive.
That’s an insight that has been lost on most observers of the political power of the Internet. Refusing to acknowledge that the Web can actually strengthen rather than undermine authoritarian regimes is extremely irresponsible and ultimately results in bad policy, if only because it gives policymakers false confidence that the only things they need to be doing are proactive—rather than reactive—in nature. But if, on careful examination, it turns out that certain types of authoritarian regimes can benefit from the Internet in disproportionally more ways than their opponents, the focus of Western democracy promotion work should shift from empowering the activists to topple their regimes to countering the governments’ own exploitation of the Web lest they become even more authoritarian. There is no point in making a revolution more effective, quick, and anonymous if the odds of the revolution’s success are worsening in the meantime.
In Search of a Missing Handle
So far, most policymakers choose to be sleepwalking through this digital minefield, whistling their favorite cyber-utopian tunes and refusing to confront all the evidence. They have also been extremely lucky because the mines were far and few between. This is not an attitude they can afford anymore, if only because the mines are now almost everywhere and, thanks to the growth of the Internet, their explosive power is much greater and has implications that go far beyond the digital realm.
As Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor Boas pointed out in Open Networks, Closed Regimes, their pioneering 2003 study about the impact of the pre-Web 2.0 Internet on authoritarianism, “conventional wisdom ... forms part of the gestalt in which policy is formulated, and a better understanding of the Internet’s political effects should lead to better policy.” The inverse is true as well: A poor understanding leads to poor policy.
If the only conclusion about the power of the Internet that Western policymakers have drawn from the Iranian events is that tweets are good for social mobilization, they are not likely to outsmart their authoritarian