The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [8]
The fervent conviction that given enough gadgets, connectivity, and foreign funding, dictatorships are doomed, which so powerfully manifested itself during the Iranian protests, reveals the pervasive influence of the Google Doctrine. But while the manic surrounding Iran’s Twitter Revolution helped to crystallize the main tenets of the doctrine, it did not beget those tenets. In fact, the Google Doctrine has a much finer intellectual pedigree—much of it rooted in the history of the Cold War—than many of its youthful proponents realize. The Nobel Prize- winning economist Paul Krugman was already warning about such premature triumphalism back in 1999 when he ridiculed its core beliefs in a book review. Ironically enough, the book was by Tom Friedman, his future fellow New York Times columnist. According to Krugman, too many Western observers, with Friedman as their cheerleader in chief, were falling under the false impression that thanks to advances in information technology “old-fashioned power politics is becoming increasingly obsolete, because it conflicts with the imperatives of global capitalism.” Invariably they were reaching the excessively optimistic conclusion that “we are heading for a world that is basically democratic, because you can’t keep ’em down on the farm once they have Internet access, and basically peaceful, because George Soros will pull out his money if you rattle your saber.” And in a world like this, how can anything but democracy triumph in the long run?
As such, the Google Doctrine owes less to the advent of tweeting and social networking than it does to the giddy sense of superiority that many in the West felt in 1989, as the Soviet system collapsed almost overnight. As history was supposed to be ending, democracy was quickly pronounced the only game in town. Technology, with its unique ability to fuel consumerist zeal—itself seen as a threat to any authoritarian regime—as well as its prowess to awaken and mobilize the masses against their rulers, was thought to be the ultimate liberator. There is a good reason why one of the chapters in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man, the ur-text of the early 1990s that successfully bridged the worlds of positive psychology and foreign affairs, was titled “The Victory of the VCR.”
The ambiguity surrounding the end of the Cold War made such arguments look far more persuasive than any close examination of their theoretical strengths would warrant. While many scholars took it to mean that the austere logic of Soviet-style communism, with its five-year plans and constant shortages of toilet paper, had simply run its course, most popular interpretations downplayed the structural deficiencies of the Soviet regime—who would want to acknowledge that the Evil Empire was only a bad joke?—preferring to emphasize the momentous achievements of the dissident movement, armed and nurtured by the West, in its struggle against a ruthless totalitarian adversary. According to this view, without the prohibited samizdat materials, photocopiers, and fax machines that were smuggled into the Soviet bloc, the Berlin Wall might have still been with us today. Once the Soviet Union’s VCR movement had arrived, communism was untenable.
The two decades that followed were a mixed bag. VCR moments were soon superseded by DVD moments, and yet such impressive breakthroughs in technology failed to bring on any impressive breakthroughs in democratization. Some authoritarian regimes, like those in Slovakia and Serbia, fell. Others, like in Belarus and Kazakhstan, only got stronger. In addition, the tragedy of 9/11 seemed to suggest that history was returning from its protracted holiday in Florida and that another ubiquitous and equally reductionist thesis of the early 1990s, that of the clash of civilizations, would come to dominate the intellectual