The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [32]
By 1995 true believers in the power of information to crush authoritarianism were treated to a book-length treatise. Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, a book by Scott Shane—who from 1988 to 1991 served as the Baltimore Sun’s Moscow correspondent—tried to make the best case for why information mattered, arguing that the “death of the Soviet illusion ... [was] not by tanks and bombs but by facts and opinions, by the release of information bottled up for decades.”
The crux of Shane’s thesis was that as the information gates opened under glasnost, people discovered unpleasant facts about the KGB’s atrocities while also being exposed to life in the West. He wasn’t entirely incorrect: Increased access to previously suppressed information did expose the numerous lies advanced by the Soviet regime. (There were so many revisions to history textbooks in 1988 that a nationwide history examination had to be scrapped, as it wasn’t clear if the old curriculum could actually count as “history” anymore.) It didn’t take long until, to use one of Shane’s memorable phrases, “ordinary information, mere facts, exploded like grenades, ripping the system and its legitimacy.”
Hold On to Your Data Grenade, Comrade!
Facts exploding like grenades certainly make for a gripping journalistic narrative, but it’s not the only reason why such accounts are so popular. Their wide acceptance also has to do with the fact that they always put people, rather than some abstract force of history or economics, first. Any information-centric account of the end of the Cold War is bound to prioritize the role of its users—dissidents, ordinary protesters, NGOs—and downplay the role played by structural, historical factors—the unbearable foreign debt accumulated by many Central European countries, the slowing down of the Soviet economy, the inability of the Warsaw Pact to compete with NATO.
Those who reject the structural explanation and believe that 1989 was a popular revolution from below are poised to see the crowds that gathered in the streets of Leipzig, Berlin, and Prague as exerting enormous pressure on communist institutions and eventually suffocating them. “Structuralists,” on the other hand, don’t make much of the crowds. For them, by October 1989 the communist regimes were already dead, politically and economically; even if the crowds would not have been as numerous, the regimes would still be as dead. And if one assumes that the Eastern European governments were already dysfunctional, unable or reluctant to fight for their existence, the heroism of protesters matters much less than most information-centric accounts suggest. Posing on the body of a dead lion that was felled by indigestion makes for a far less impressive photo op.
This debate—whether it was the dissidents or some impersonal social force that brought down communism in Eastern Europe—has taken a new shape in the growing academic dispute about whether something like “civil society” (still a favorite buzzword of many foundations and development institutions) existed under communism and whether it played any significant role in precipitating the public protests. Debates over “civil society” have immense repercussions for the future of Internet freedom policy, in part because this fuzzy concept is often endowed with revolutionary potential and bloggers are presumed to be in its vanguard. But if it turns out that the dissidents—and civil society as