The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [31]
Notice, for example, how Gordon Crovitz, a Wall Street Journal columnist, makes an exaggerated claim about the Cold War—“the Cold War was won by spreading information about the Free World”—before recommending a course of action—“in a world of tyrants scared of their own citizens, the new tools of the Web should be even more terrifying if the outside world makes sure that people have access to its tools.” (Crovitz’s was an argument in favor of giving more public money to Falun Gong-affiliated Internet groups.) Another 2009 column in the Journal, this time penned by former members of the Bush administration, pulls the same trick: “Just as providing photocopies and fax machines helped Solidarity dissidents in communist Poland in the 1980s”—here is the necessary qualifier without which the advice might seem less credible—“grants should be given to private groups to develop and field firewall-busting technology.”
These may all be worthwhile policy recommendations, but they rest on a highly original—some historians might say suspicious—interpretation of the Cold War. Because of its unexpected and extremely fast-paced end, it begot all sorts of highly abstract theories about the power of information to transform power itself. That the end of communism in the East coincided with the beginning of a new stage in the information revolution in the West convinced many people that a monocausal relationship was at work here. The advent of the Internet was only the most obvious breakthrough, but other technologies—above all, the radio—got a lion’s share of the credit for the downfall of Soviet communism. “Why did the West win the Cold War?” asks Michael Nelson, former chairman of the Reuters Foundation in his 2003 book about the history of Western broadcasting to the Soviet bloc. “Not by use of arms. Weapons did not breach the Iron Curtain. The Western invasion was by radio, which was mightier than the sword.” Autobiographies of radio journalists and executives who were commanding that “invasion” in outposts like Radio Free Europe or the Voice of America are full of such rhetorical bluster; they are clearly not the ones to downplay their own roles in bringing democracy to Eastern Europe.
The person to blame for popularizing such views happens to be the same hero many conservatives widely believe to have won the Cold War itself: Ronald Reagan. Since he was the man in charge of all those Western radio broadcasts and spearheaded the undercover support to samizdat-printing dissidents, any account that links the fall of communism to the role of technology would invariably glorify Reagan’s own role in the process. Reagan, however, did not have to wait for future interpretations. Proclaiming that “breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it was lace,” he started the conversation that eventually degenerated into the dreamy world of “virtual curtains” and “cyber-walls.” Once Reagan announced that “information is the oxygen of the modern age” and that “it seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders,” pundits, politicians, and think-tankers knew they had a metaphorical treasure trove while Reagan’s numerous supporters saw this narrative as finally acknowledging their hero’s own gigantic contribution to ushering in democracy into Europe. (China’s microchip manufacturers must have been laughing all the way to the bank when Reagan predicted that “the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.”)
It just took a few months to add analytical luster to Reagan’s pronouncements and turn it into something of a coherent history. In 1990, the RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank that, perhaps by the sheer virtue of its propitious location, never passes up an opportunity to praise the powers of modern technology, reached a strikingly