The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [22]
This is not to deny that, once mastered, the Internet could be a powerful tool in the arsenal of a policymaker; in fact, once such mastery is achieved, it would certainly be irresponsible not to deploy this tool. But as Langdon Winner, one of the shrewdest thinkers about the political implications of modern technology, once observed, “although virtually limitless in their power, our technologies are tools without handles.” The Internet is, unfortunately, no exception. The handle that overconfident policymakers feel in their hands is just an optical illusion; theirs is a false mastery. They don’t know how to tap into the power of the Internet, nor can they anticipate the consequences of their actions. In the meantime, all their awkward moments add up and, as was the case in Iran, have dire consequences.
Most of the Western efforts to use the Internet in the fight against authoritarianism could best be described as trying to apply a poor cure to the wrong disease. Policymakers have little control over their cure, which keeps mutating every day, so it never works the way they expect it to. (The lack of a handle does not help either.) The disease part is even more troublesome. The kind of authoritarianism they really want to fight expired in 1989. Today, however, is no 1989, and the sooner policymakers realize this, the sooner they can start crafting Internet policies that are better suited for the modern world.
The upside is that even tools without handles can be of some limited use in any household. One just needs to treat them as such and search for contexts where they are needed. At minimum, one should ensure that such tools don’t hurt anyone who tries to use them with the assumption of inevitable mastery. Until policymakers come to terms with the fact that their Internet predicament is driven by such highly uncertain dynamics, they will never succeed in harvesting the Web’s mighty potential.
chapter two
Texting Like It’s 1989
The history of cyber-utopianism is not very eventful, but the date January 21, 2010, has a guaranteed place in its annals—probably right next to Andrew Sullivan’s blog posts about Twitter’s role in Tehran. For this was the day when the sitting U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, went to the Newseum, America’s finest museum of news and journalism, to deliver a seminal speech about Internet freedom and thus acknowledge the Internet’s prominent role in foreign affairs.
The timing of Clinton’s speech could not have been better. Just a week earlier, Google announced it was considering pulling out of China—hinting that the Chinese government may have had something to do with it—so everyone was left guessing if the issue would get a mention (it did). One could feel palpable excitement all over Washington: An American commitment to promoting Internet freedom promised a new line of work for entire families in this town. All the usual suspects—policy analysts, lobbyists, consultants—were eagerly anticipating the opening salvo of this soon-to-be-lavishly-funded “war for Internet freedom.” For Washington, it was the kind of universally admired quest for global justice that could allow think tanks to churn out a slew of in-depth research studies, defense contractors to design a number of cutting-edge censorship-breaking technologies, and NGOs to conduct a series of risky trainings in the most exotic locales on Earth. This is why Washington beats any other city in the world, including Iran and Beijing, in terms of how often and how many of its residents search for the term “Internet freedom” on Google. A campaign