The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [21]
Much of the current cognitive dissonance is of do-gooders’ own making. What did they get wrong? Well, perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know. Which of the numerous forces unleashed by the Web will prevail in a particular social and political context is impossible to tell without first getting a thorough theoretical understanding of that context.
Likewise, it is naïve to believe that such a sophisticated and multipurpose technology as the Internet could produce identical outcomes—whether good or bad—in countries as diverse as Belarus, Burma, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia. There is so much diversity across modern authoritarian regimes that some Tolstoy paraphrasing might be in order: While all free societies are alike, each unfree society is unfree in its own way. Statistically, it’s highly unlikely that such disparate entities would all react to such a powerful stimulus in the same way. To argue that the Internet would result in similar change—that is, democratization—in countries like Russia and China is akin to arguing that globalization, too, would also exert the same effect on them; more than a decade into the new century, such deterministic claims seem highly suspicious.
It is equally erroneous to assume that authoritarianism rests on brutal force alone. Religion, culture, history, and nationalism are all potent forces that, with or without the Internet, shape the nature of modern authoritarianism in ways that no one fully understands yet. In some cases, they undermine it; in many others, they enable it. Anyone who believes in the power of the Internet as I do should resist the temptation to embrace Internet-centrism and unthinkingly assume that, under the pressure of technology, all of these complex forces will evolve in just one direction, making modern authoritarian regimes more open, more participatory, more decentralized, and, all along, more conducive to democracy. The Internet does matter, but we simply don’t know how it matters. This fact, paradoxically, only makes it matter even more: The costs of getting it wrong are tremendous. What’s clear is that few insights would be gained by looking inward—that is, trying to crack the logic of the Internet; its logic can never be really understood outside the context in which it manifests itself.
Of course, such lack of certainty does not make the job of promoting democracy in the digital age any easier. But, at minimum, it would help if policymakers—and the public at large—free themselves of any intellectual obstacles and biases that may skew their thinking and result in utopian theorizing that has little basis in reality. The hysterical reaction to the protests in Iran has revealed that the West clearly lacks a good working theory about the impact of the Internet on authoritarianism. This is why policymakers, in a desperate attempt to draw at least some lessons about technology and democratization, subject recent events like the overthrow of communist regimes in Eastern Europe to some rather twisted interpretation. Whatever the theoretical merits of such historical parallels, policymakers should remember that all frameworks have consequences: One poorly chosen historical analogy, and the entire strategy derived from it can go to waste.
Nevertheless, while it may be impossible to produce many generalizable laws to describe the relationship between