The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [55]
Dictators and Their Dilemmas
While it’s becoming clear that few authoritarian regimes are interested in completely shutting down all communications, if only because they want to stay abreast of emerging threats, censorship of at least some content is inevitable. For the last three decades, conventional wisdom suggested that the need to censor put authoritarian regimes into a corner: They either censored and thus suffered the economic consequences, for censorship is incompatible with globalization, or they didn’t censor and thus risked a revolution. Hillary Clinton said as much in her Internet freedom speech: “Countries that censor news and information must recognize that from an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech. If businesses in your nations are denied access to either type of information, it will inevitably impact on growth.” Reporting on the role of technology in powering Iran’s Twitter Revolution, the New York Times expressed a similar opinion: “Because digital technologies are so critical today to modern economies, repressive governments would pay a high price for shutting them out completely, if that were still possible.”
This binary view—that dictators cannot globalize unless they open up their networks to hordes of international consultants and investment bankers scouring their lands in search of the next acquisition target—has become known as “dictator’s dilemma” and found many supporters among policymakers, especially when the latter discuss the benevolent role of the Internet. But the existence of a direct connection between economic growth and modern-day Internet censorship is not self-evident. Could it be yet another poorly examined and rather harmful assumption that stems from the Cold War?
In 1985 George Schultz, the then U.S. secretary of state, was one of the first to articulate the popular view when he said that “totalitarian societies face a dilemma: either they try to stifle these technologies and thereby fall further behind in the new industrial revolution, or else they permit these technologies and see their totalitarian control inevitably eroded.” And those governments were doomed, according to Schultz: “They do not have a choice, because they will never be able entirely to block the tide of technological advance.” Schultz’s view, expressed in a high-profile article in Foreign Affairs, gained a lot of supporters. A 1989 editorial in the New Republic just a week after the Chinese government cleared the protestors out of Tiananmen Square argued that the choice facing the dictators was either to “let the people think for themselves and speak their minds ...—or smell your economy rot.”
This was music to the ears of many Eastern Europeans at the time, and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet system seemed to vindicate the New Republic’s determinism. In fact, such predictions were the intellectual product of the optimism of that era. Anyone following the zeitgeist of the late 1980s and early 1990s couldn’t have missed the connection between two popular theories at the time, one pertaining to technology and one to politics, that, in a rather mysterious twist, bore virtually the same name. One theory, developed by the futurist Alvin Toffler, posited that the rapid technological change of the period would give rise to the “Third Wave Society,” marked by democratized access to knowledge and the dawn of the information age. For Toffler, information technology followed two other revolutionary waves, agriculture and industrialization, ushering in a completely new period in human history.
The second theory, developed by the Harvard political