The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [54]
The noted social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool, one of the leading thinkers about technology and democracy of the last century, played an important role in shaping how the West understands the role that information plays in authoritarian states. “The authoritarian state is inherently fragile and will quickly collapse if information flows freely,” wrote Pool, giving rise to a view that has become widely shared—and, undoubtedly, made Pool and his numerous followers overestimate the liberating power of information. (Pool, a disillusioned ex-Trotskyite, also famously overestimated the power of Western broadcasting, using letters that Eastern Europeans sent to Radio Free Europe as one of his main sources.) Such technological utopianism stems from a rather shallow reading of the politics and regime dynamics of authoritarian states. For if one presumes, like Pool, that authoritarian structures rest on little else than the suppression of information, as soon as the West finds a way to poke holes in those structures, it follows that democracy promotion boils down to finding ways to unleash the information flood on the oppressed.
On closer examination, views like Pool’s appear counterintuitive and for good reason. Surely there are benefits to having access to more sources of information, if only because a regime can flag emerging threats. (On this point, Iranian rulers of the past were a bit more sophisticated than many contemporary Western academics.) That diverse and independent information can help heighten—or at least preserve—their power has not been lost on those presiding over authoritarian states. One insightful observer of the final years of the Soviet era remarked in 1987: “There surely must be days—maybe the morning after Chernobyl—when Gorbachev wishes he could buy a Kremlin equivalent of the Washington Post and find out what is going on in his socialist wonder-land.” (Gorbachev did acknowledge that Western radio broadcasts were instrumental in helping him follow the short-lived putsch in August 1991, when he was locked up in his Sochi dacha.)
Well, there is no need to hunt for the Russian equivalents of the Washington Post anymore. Even in the absence of a truly free press, Dmitry Medvedev can learn almost everything he needs from the diverse world of Russian blogs. As he himself has confessed, this is how he starts many of his mornings. (Medvedev is also a big fan of ebooks and the iPad.) And he doesn’t have to spend much time searching for complaints. Anyone with a grudge against a local bureaucrat can leave a complaint as a comment on Medvedev’s blog, a popular practice in Russia. And to score some bonus propaganda points, Medvedev’s subordinates like to take highly publicized action in response to such complaints, replacing the crumbling infrastructure and firing the corrupt bureaucrats. This, however, is done selectively, more for the propaganda value it creates than for the purpose of fixing the system. No one knows what happens to the complaints that are too critical or border on whistle-blowing, but quite a few angry messages are removed from the blog very quickly. (Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s predecessor as president and currently Russia’s prime minister, also likes to collect complaints by having people call in to his yearly TV address; when in 2007 a police officer told the switchboard operator he wanted to complain about corruption in his unit, his call was traced, and he was reprimanded.) Similarly, while the Chinese authorities are blocking openly antigovernment content,