The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [71]
In countries where even ardent supporters of democratization are often paranoid about foreign intervention, all it takes to discredit a blogger is to accuse her of being funded by the CIA, MI6, or Mossad (or, even better, all three simultaneously!). If that accusation is repeated by a hundred other bloggers—even if some of them look rather dubious—most sane critics of the government think twice before reposting that blogger’s critical message. The best way to create such a culture of mistrust is for governments to cultivate extremely agile rapid-response blogging teams that fight fire with fire.
The benefits of such an approach have not been lost on Western policy wonks. In 2008 Cass Sunstein, a prominent American legal scholar who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, coauthored a punchy policy paper that recommended the U.S. government practice “cognitive infiltration” of Internet groups that are spreading conspiracy theories, suggesting that “government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.” As far as Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are concerned, those pushing for greater U.S.-style democratization of their countries are also part of some kind of conspiracy theory. Not surprisingly, they are the ones who put Sunstein’s recommendations into practice by hiring their own contingents of government-funded but technically independent online commentators. (Also not surprisingly, Sunstein’s suggestions are hardly politically accepted in the Western world. It’s hard to imagine anyone supporting White House-funded covert bloggers engaging in deliberations with the conservative bloggers they disagree with.)
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One of the most persistent myths in public discussions about the Internet is that authoritarian governments are just weak and ineffective bureaucracies that fear or don’t understand technology and are thus bound to misuse it, even if, in defiance of “dictator’s dilemma,” they let it in. This is, of course, a misguided perspective: after all, it is Hugo Chavez, not Hillary Clinton, who is tweeting from his BlackBerry. (Asked about Twitter a few days after the protests began in Iran, Clinton couldn’t muster anything but “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter. But apparently it is very important.”)
The reason why so many authoritarian governments have proved adept at getting their online propaganda act right is because they have been surrounded by some of the brightest Internet visionaries in their countries. It’s a mistake to think that such governments rely on poor advice from the wrong people; they are listening to some of the best advice they can get. In part, this is happening because working for the government entails a lot of undisputed advantages. Despite the seeming irrelevance of the ideals of communism in today’s highly globalized world, some of the brightest young people in China are still very much driven to join the ranks of the Communist Party, if only because it provides a significant boost to their career. (A popular slogan among Chinese youth goes like this: “Before you enter the Party you’re sweating all over; after you enter the Party you can relax. Before you enter the Party you’re full of revolution; after you enter the Party you meld into the crowd.”) One Chinese university surveyed students and intellectuals who were Party members and found out that almost half of them joined the Party in the hope that it would help them find a good job. Since modern authoritarian regimes don’t really project a set of coherent values or ideologies—China and Russia haven’t been able to successfully communicate what they are really about post-Lenin and post-Mao—many talented young people are not as disturbed working for their governments as they might have been had their leaders