The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [23]
But there was also something distinctively unique about this gathering. It’s not very often that the Beltway’s BlackBerry mafia—the buttoned-up think-tankers and policy wonks—get to share a room with the iPhone fanboys—the unkempt and chronically underdressed entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. Few other events could bring together Larry Diamond, a senior research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and Chris “FactoryJoe” Messina, the twenty-nine-year-old cheerleader of Web 2.0 and Google’s “Open Web Advocate” (that’s his official job title!). It was a “geeks + wonks” feast.
The speech itself did not offer many surprises; its objective was to establish “Internet freedom” as a new priority for American foreign policy, and judging by the buzz that Clinton’s performance generated in the media, that objective was accomplished, even if specific details were never divulged. The generalizations drawn by Clinton were rather upbeat—“information freedom supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress”—and so were her prescriptions: “We need to put these tools in the hands of people around the world who will use them to advance democracy and human rights.” There were too many buzzwords—“deficiencies in the current market for innovation,” “harnessing the power of connection technologies,” “long-term dividends from modest investments in innovation”—but such, perhaps, was the cost of trying to look cool in front of the Silicon Valley audience.
Excessive optimism and empty McKinsey-speak aside, it was Clinton’s creative use of recent history that really stood out. Clinton drew a parallel between the challenges of promoting Internet freedom and the experiences of supporting dissidents during the Cold War. Speaking of her recent visit to Germany to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Clinton mentioned “the courageous men and women” who “made the case against oppression by circulating small pamphlets called samizdat,” which “helped pierce the concrete and concertina wire of the Iron Curtain.” (Newseum was a very appropriate venue to give in to Cold War nostalgia. It happens to house the largest display of sections of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany).
Something very similar is happening today, argued Clinton, adding that “as networks spread to nations around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls.” And as “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world ... viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.” Even though Clinton did not articulate many policy objectives, they were not hard to guess from her chosen analogy. Virtual walls are to be pierced, information curtains are to be raised, digital samizdat is to be supported and disseminated, and bloggers are to be celebrated as dissidents.
As far as Washington was concerned, having Clinton utter that highly seductive phrase—“a new information curtain”—in the same breath as the Berlin Wall was tantamount to announcing a sequel to the Cold War in 3D. She tapped into the secret desires of many policymakers, who had been pining for an enemy they understood, someone unlike that bunch of bearded and cave-bound men from Waziristan who showed little appreciation for balance-of-power theorizing and seemed to occupy so much of the present agenda.
It was Ronald Reagan’s lieutenants who must have felt particularly excited. Having claimed victory in the analog Cold War, they felt well-prepared to enlist—nay, triumph—in its digital equivalent. But it was certainly not the word “Internet” that made Internet freedom such an exciting issue for this group. As such, the quest for destroying the world’s cyber-walls has given this aging generation of cold warriors, increasingly out of touch with a world beset by problems like climate change or the lack of financial regulation, something of a lifeline. Not that those other modern