The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [24]
WWW&W
It only took a few months for one such peculiar group of Washington insiders to convene a high-profile conference to discuss how a host of Cold War policies—and particularly Western support for Soviet dissidents—could be recovered from the dustbin of history and applied to the current situation. Spearheaded by George W. Bush, who, by then, had mostly retreated from the public arena, the gathering attracted a number of hawkish neoconservatives. Perhaps out of sheer disgust with the lackluster foreign policy record of the Obama administration, they had decided to wage their own fight for freedom on the Internet.
There was, of course, something surreal about George W. Bush, who was rather dismissive of the “Internets” while in office, presiding over this Internet-worship club. But then, for Bush at least, this meeting had little to do with the Web per se. Rather, its goal was to push the “freedom agenda” into new, digital territories. Seeing the internet as an ally, Bush, always keen to flaunt his credentials as the dissidents’ best friend—he met more than a hundred of them while in office—agreed to host a gathering of what he called “global cyber-dissidents” in, of all places, Texas. Featuring half a dozen political bloggers from countries like Syria, Cuba, Colombia, and Iran, the conference was one of the first major public events organized by the newly inaugurated George W. Bush Institute. The pomposity of its lineup, with panels like “Freedom Stories from the Front Lines” and “Global Lessons in eFreedom,” suggested that even two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, its veterans are still fluent in Manichean rhetoric.
But the Texas conference was not just a gathering of disgruntled and unemployed neoconservatives; respected Internet experts, like Ethan Zuckerman and Hal Roberts of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, were in attendance as well. A senior official from the State Department—technically an Obama man—was also dispatched to Texas. “This conference highlights the work of a new generation of dissidents in the hope that it will become a beacon to others,” said James Glassman, a former high-profile official in the Bush administration and the president of the George W. Bush Institute, on opening the event. According to Glassman, the conference aimed “to identify trends in effective cyber communication that spread human freedom and advance human rights.” (Glassman, it must be said, is to cyber-utopianism what Thoreau is to civil disobedience; he famously coauthored a book called Dow 36,000, predicting that the Dow Jones was on its way toward a new height; it came out a few months before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.)
David Keyes, a director of a project called Cyberdissidents.org, was one of the keynote speakers at the Bush event, serving as a kind of bridge to the world of the old Soviet dissidents. He used to work with Natan Sharansky, a prominent Soviet dissident whose thinking shaped much of the Bush administration’s global quest for freedom. (Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror was one of the few books Bush read during his time in office; it exerted a significant influence, as Bush himself acknowledged: “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy read Natan Sharansky’s book.... Read it. It’s a great book.”) According to Keyes, the mission of Cyberdissidents.org is to “make the Middle East’s pro-democracy Internet activists famous and beloved in the West”—that is, to bring them to Sharansky’s level of fame (the man himself sits on Cyberdissidents’s board of advisers).
But one shouldn’t jump