The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [48]
Mash ’Em Up!
To borrow a few buzzwords from today’s Internet culture, it’s time to mash up and remix the two visions. To understand modern authoritarianism (and, some would argue, modern capitalism as well), we need insights from both thinkers. The rigidity of thought suggested by the Orwell-Huxley coordinate system leads many an otherwise shrewd observer to overlook the Huxleyan elements in dictatorships and, as disturbingly, the Orwellian elements in democracies. This is why it has become so easy to miss the fact that, as the writer Naomi Klein puts it, “China is becoming more like [the West] in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and [the West is] becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).”
It seems fairly noncontroversial that most modern dictators would prefer a Huxleyan world to an Orwellian one, if only because controlling people through entertainment is cheaper and doesn’t involve as much brutality. When the extremely restrictive Burmese government permits—and sometimes even funds—hip-hop performances around the country, it’s not 1984 that inspires them.
With a few clearly sadistic exceptions, dictators are not in it for the blood; all they want is money and power. If they can have it simply by distracting—rather than spying on, censoring, and arresting—their people, all the better. In the long term, this strategy is far more effective than 24/7 policing, because policing, as effective as it might be in the short term, tends to politicize people and drive them toward dissent in the longer run. That Big Brother no longer has to be watching its citizens because they themselves are watching Big Brother on TV hardly bodes well for the democratic revolution.
Thus, as far as distraction is concerned, the Internet has boosted the power of the Huxley-inspired dictatorships. YouTube and Facebook, with their bottomless reservoirs of cheap entertainment, allow individuals to customize the experience to suit their tastes. When Philip Roth was warning the Czechs of the perils of commercial television, he was also suggesting that it could make a revolution like the one in 1989 impossible. Ironically, the Czechs had been lucky to have such hapless apparatchiks running the entertainment industry. People got bored easily and turned to politics instead. Where new media and the Internet truly excel is in suppressing boredom. Previously, boredom was one of the few truly effective ways to politicize the population denied release valves for channeling their discontent, but this is no longer the case. In a sense, the Internet has made the entertainment experiences of those living under authoritarianism and those living in a democracy much alike. Today’s Czechs watch the same Hollywood movies as today’s Belarusians—many probably even download them from the same illegally run servers somewhere in Serbia or Ukraine. The only difference is that the Czechs already had a democratic revolution, the results of which, luckily for them, were made irreversible when the Czech Republic joined the European Union. Meanwhile, the Belarusians were not as lucky; the prospects of their democratic revolution in the age of YouTube look very grim.
In other words, the Internet has brought