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By Root 1684 0

the Internet has allowed better integration of academics and intellectuals from authoritarian states into a global intellectual sphere—they, too, can now follow debates in the New York Review of Books—but this has happened at the expense of severing their ties to local communities. Russian liberal intellectuals draw far larger crowds in New York, London, or Berlin than they do in Moscow, Novosibirsk, or Vladivostok, where many of them remain unknown. Not surprisingly, most of them are better informed about what’s going on in Greenwich Village than in their own town hall. But their connection to politics in their native countries has also been severed; paradoxically, as they have gotten more venues to express their anger and dissent, they have chosen to retract into the nonpolitical.

It’s rather depressing that none of the major Russian writers who have established a rather active presence online bothered to discuss or even mention the results of the 2008 Russian presidential elections on their blogs. Ellen Rutten, at the University of Cambridge, was the first to notice and describe the virtually nonexistent reaction to such a highly political event. She wrote that “none of the ... [blogging] authors ... chose to switch on the computer and react in writing to the news that must have permeated their intellectual environment.” Instead, the giants of modern Russian literature decided to devote their first blog posts after the election to: (a) discussing a recent Internet conference, (b) posting a theater review, (c) describing a gigantic pie with “little cherries and peaches” spotted at a recent book fair, (d) reviewing Walt Whitman, and (e) posting a story about a man with two brains. (One could only hope that at least that last entry was an allegory meant to ridicule the Putin-Medvedev alliance.) This is definitely not what the famous Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko meant when he proclaimed that “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.”

This is hardly a promising environment for fighting the authoritarian chimera. All potential revolutionaries seem to be in a pleasant intellectual exile somewhere in California. The masses have been transported to Hollywood by means of pirated films they download from BitTorrent, while the elites have been shuttling between Palo Alto and Long Beach by way of TED talks. Whom exactly do we expect to lead this digital revolution? The lolcats?

If anything, the Internet makes it harder, not easier, to get people to care, if only because the alternatives to political action are so much more pleasant and risk-free. This doesn’t mean that we in the West should stop promoting unfettered (read: uncensored) access to the Internet; rather, we need to find ways to supplant our promotion of a freer Internet with strategies that can engage people in political and social life. Here we should talk to both heavy consumers of cat videos and those who follow anthropology blogs. Otherwise, we may end up with an army of people who are free to connect, but all they want to connect to is potential lovers, pornography, and celebrity gossip.

The environment of information abundance is not by itself conducive to democratization, as it may disrupt a number of subtle but important relationships that help to nurture critical thinking. It’s only now, as even democratic societies are navigating through this new environment of infinite content, that we realize that democracy is a much trickier, fragile, and demanding beast than we had previously assumed and that some of the conditions that enabled it may have been highly specific to an epoch when information was scarce.

The Orwell-Huxley Sandwich Has Expired

As the East German experience revealed, many Western observers like endowing those living under authoritarian conditions with magical and heroic qualities they do not have. Perhaps imagining these poor folks in a perpetual struggle against the all-seeing KGB rather than, say, relaxing in front of YouTube or playing Tetris is the only way for Western observers not to despair at their own inability to do much about