The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [34]
When the Radio Waves Seemed Mightier Than the Tanks
If there is a genuine lesson to be drawn from Cold War history, it is that the increased effectiveness of information technology is still severely constrained by the internal and external politics of the regime at hand, and once those politics start changing, it may well be possible to take advantage of the new technologies. A strong government that has a will to live would do its utmost to deny Internet technology its power to mobilize. As long as the Internet is tied to physical infrastructure, this is not so hard to accomplish: In virtually all authoritarian states, governments maintain control over communication networks and can turn them off at the first sign of protests. As the Chinese authorities began worrying about the growing unrest in Xinjiang in 2009, they simply turned off all Internet communications for ten months; it was a very thorough cleansing, but a few weeks would suffice in less threatening cases. Of course, they may incur significant economic losses because of such information blackouts, but when forced to choose between a blackout and a coup, many choose the former.
Even the strongest authoritarian governments are consistently challenged by protesters. It seems somewhat naïve to believe that strong authoritarian governments will balk at cracking down on protesters for fear of being accused of being too brutal, even if their every action is captured on camera; most likely, they will simply learn how to live with those accusations. The Soviet Union didn’t hesitate to send tanks to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968; the Chinese didn’t pause before sending tanks to Tiananmen Square, despite a sophisticated network of fax machines that was sending the information to the West; the Burmese junta didn’t balk at suppressing a march by the monks, despite the presence of foreign journalists documenting their actions. The most overlooked aspect of the 2009 protests in Tehran is that even though the government was well aware that many protesters were carrying mobile phones, it still dispatched snipers on building roofs and ordered them to shoot (one such sniper supposedly shot twenty-seven-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan; her death was captured on video, and she became one of the heroes of the Green Movement, with one Iranian factory even manufacturing statues of her). There is little evidence to suggest that, at least for the kind of leaders who are least likely to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, exposure results in less violence.
Most important, governments can also take advantage of decentralized information flows and misinform their population about how popular the protest movement really is. That decentralization and multiplication of digital information would somehow make it easier for the fence-sitters to infer what is really happening in the streets seems a rather unfounded assumption. In fact, history teaches us that media could as easily send false signals; many Hungarians still remember the utterly irresponsible broadcasts by Radio Free Europe on the eve of the Soviet invasion in 1956, which suggested that American military aid would be forthcoming (it wasn’t). Some of those broadcasts even offered tips on antitank warfare, urging the Hungarians to resist the Soviet occupation; they could be held at least partially responsible for the 3,000 deaths that followed the invasion. Such misinformation, whether deliberate or not, could flourish in the age of Twitter (the effort to spread fake videos purporting to show the burning of Ayatollah Khomeini’s portrait in the aftermath of the Iranian protests is a case in point).
Nor is the decentralized nature of communications always good in itself, especially if the objective is to make as many people informed as fast as possible. In a 2009 interview with the Globe and Mail, the East German dissident Rainer Muller noted how beneficial it was that the nation’s attention was not dispersed in the late 1980s: