The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [35]
While a definitive history of the Cold War remains to be written, the uniqueness of its end is not to be underestimated. Too many factors were stacked against the survival of the Soviet system: Gorbachev sent a number of cautionary signals to the communist leaders of Eastern Europe warning them against crackdowns and making it clear that the Kremlin wouldn’t assist in suppressing popular uprisings; a number of Eastern European countries were running economies on the brink of bankruptcy and had a very dark future ahead of them, with or without the protests; East German police could have easily prevented the demonstrations in Leipzig, but its leaders did not exercise their authority; and a small technical change in Poland’s electoral law could have prevented the Solidarity movement from forming a government that inspired other democratic movements in the region.
This is the great paradox of the Cold War’s end: On the one hand, the structural conditions of countries of the Soviet bloc in late 1989 were so lethal that it seemed inevitable that communism would die. On the other hand, communist hard-liners had so much room to maneuver that absolutely nothing guaranteed that the end of the Cold War would be as bloodless as it turned out to be. Given how many things could have gone wrong in the process, it’s still something of a miracle that the Soviet bloc—Romania notwithstanding—went under so peacefully. It takes a rather peculiar historical sense to look at this highly particularistic case and draw far-reaching conclusions about the role of technology in its demise and then assume that such conclusions would also hold in completely different contexts like China or Iran twenty years later. Western policymakers should rid themselves of the illusion that communism ended quickly—under the pressure of information or fax machines—or that it was guaranteed to end peacefully because the whole world was watching. The fall of communism was the result of a much longer process, and the popular protests were just its most visible, but not necessarily most important, component. Technology may have played a role, but it did so because of particular historical circumstances rather than because of technology’s own qualities. Those circumstances were highly specific to Soviet communism and may no longer exist.
Western policymakers simply can’t change modern Russia, China, or Iran using methods from the late 1980s. Simply opening up the information gates would not erode modern authoritarian regimes, in part because they have learned to function in an environment marked by the abundance of information. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that, contrary to the expectations of many in the West, certain kinds of information could actually strengthen them.
chapter three
Orwell’s Favorite Lolcat
“The Tits Show” sounds like a promising name for a weekly Internet show. Hosted by Russia.ru, Russia’s pioneering experiment in Internet television supported by Kremlin’s ideologues, the show’s format is rather simple: A horny and slightly overweight young man travels around Moscow nightclubs in search of perfect breasts. Moscow nightlife being what it is, the show is never short of things to film and women to grope and interview.
“The Tits Show” is just one of more than two dozen weekly and daily video shows produced by the Russia.ru team to satisfy the quirky tastes of Russian Internet users (and “produced” they truly are: much of the site’s staff are defectors from the world of professional television). Some of those shows discuss politics—there are even a few odd interviews with Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev—but most are quite