The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [44]
But intellectuals are not blameless here either. As democracy replaced communism, many of them were bitterly disappointed by the populist, xenophobic, and vulgar politics favored by the masses. Despite the widespread myth that Soviet dissidents were all believers in U.S.-style democracy, many of them—including, at some point, even Sakharov—felt extremely ambivalent about letting people rule themselves; what many of them really wanted was better-run communism. But the triumph of liberal democracy and the consumerism that it unleashed sent many of these intellectuals into the second, perhaps somewhat less repressive, phase of their internal exile, this time combined with despicable obscurity.
It would take a new generation of intellectuals—and unusually creative intellectuals at that—to awaken the captive minds of their fellow citizens from their current entertainment slumber. As it turns out, there is not much demand for intellectuals when so many social and cultural needs can be satisfied the same way they are satisfied in the West: with an iPad. (It helps that China knows how to manufacture them at half the price!) The Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich knows that the game is over, at least as far as serious ideas are concerned: “The point is not that we have no Havel, we do, but that they are not called for by society.” And the Belarusian government, not surprisingly, doesn’t seem to object to this state of affairs. On a recent trip to Belarus I discovered that some Internet Service Providers run their own servers full of illegal movies and music, available to their customers for free, while the government, which could easily put an end to such practices, prefers to look the other way and may even be encouraging them.
Consumerism is not the only reason behind the growing disengagement between the intellectuals and the masses living in authoritarian states. The Internet opened up a trove of resources for the former, allowing them to connect to their Western colleagues and follow global intellectual debates as they happen, not as their summaries are smuggled in on yellowish photocopies. But efficiency and comfort—which the Internet provides—are not necessarily the best conditions for fomenting dissent among the educated classes. The real reason why so many scientists and academics turned to dissent during Soviet times was because they were not allowed to practice the kind of science they wanted to on their own terms. Doing any kind of research in the social sciences was quite difficult even without having to follow the ideological line of the local communist cell; collaborating with foreigners was equally challenging. Lack of proper working conditions forced many academics and intellectuals either to immigrate or to stay home and become dissidents.
The Internet has solved or alleviated many of these problems, and it has proved excellent for research, but not so excellent for bringing smart and highly educated people into the dissident movement. Collaboration is now cheap and instantaneous, academics have access to more papers than they could have dreamed of, travel bans have been lifted, and research budgets have been significantly increased. Not surprisingly, by 2020 Chinese scientists are expected to produce more academic papers than American ones. Most significantly,