The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [27]
European politicians are equally poetic. Carl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden, believes that dictatorships are fighting a losing battle because “cyber walls are as certain to fall as the walls of concrete once did.” And even members of predominantly liberal NGOs cannot resist the temptation. “As in the cold war [when] you had an Iron Curtain, there is concern that authoritarian governments ... are developing a Virtual Curtain,” says Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch.
Journalists, always keen to sacrifice nuance in the name of supposed clarity, are the worst abusers of Cold War history for the purpose of explaining the imperative to promote Internet freedom to their audience. Roger Cohen, a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune, writes that while “Tear down this wall!” was a twentieth-century cry, the proper cry for the twenty-first century is “Tear down this firewall!” Foreign Affairs’ David Feith argues that “just as East Germans diminished Soviet legitimacy by escaping across Checkpoint Charlie, ‘hacktivists’ today do the same by breaching Internet cyber walls.” And to dispel any suspicions that such linguistic promiscuity could be a mere coincidence, Eli Lake, a contributing editor for the New Republic, opines that “during the cold war, the dominant metaphor for describing the repression of totalitarian regimes was The Berlin Wall. To update that metaphor, we should talk about The Firewall,” as if the similarity between the two cases was nothing but self-evident.
Things get worse once observers begin to develop what they think are informative and insightful parallels that go beyond the mere pairing of the Berlin Wall with the Firewall, attempting to establish a nearly functional identity between some of the activities and phenomena of the Cold War era and those of today’s Internet. This is how blogging becomes samizdat (Columbia University’s Lee Bollinger proclaims that “like the underground samizdat ... the Web has allowed free speech to avoid the reach of the most authoritarian regimes”); bloggers become dissidents (Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, says that “bloggers are a form of 21st century dissident”); and the Internet itself becomes a new and improved platform for Western broadcasting (New York University’s Clay Shirky argues that what the Internet allows in authoritarian states “is way more threatening than Voice of America”). Since the Cold War vocabulary so profoundly affects how Western policymakers conceptualize the Internet and measure its effectiveness as a policy instrument, it’s little wonder that so many of them are impressed. Blogs are, indeed, more efficient at spreading banned information than photocopiers.
The origins of the highly ambitious cyber-con agenda are thus easy to pin down; anyone who takes all these metaphors seriously, whatever the ideology, would inevitably be led to believe that the Internet is a new battleground for freedom and that, as long as Western policymakers could ensure that the old cyber-walls are destroyed and no new ones are erected in their place, authoritarianism is doomed.
Nostalgia’s Lethal Metaphors
But perhaps there is no need to be so dismissive of the Cold War experience. After all, it’s a relatively recent battle, still fresh in the minds of many people working on issues of Internet freedom today. Plenty of information-related aspects of the Cold War—think radio-jamming—bear at least some minor technical resemblance to today’s concerns about Internet censorship. Besides, it’s inevitable that decision makers in any field, not just politics, would draw on their prior experiences to understand any new problems they confront, even if they might adjust some of their previous conclusions in light of new facts.