The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [9]
But as the Iranian events of 2009 have so clearly demonstrated, the Google Doctrine was simply put on the backburner; it did not collapse. The sighting of pro-democratic Iranians caught in a tight embrace with Twitter, a technology that many Westerners previously saw as a rather peculiar way to share one’s breakfast plans, was enough to fully rehabilitate its core principles and even update them with a fancier Web 2.0 vocabulary. The almost-forgotten theory that people, once armed with a powerful technology, would triumph over the most brutal adversaries—regardless of what gas and oil prices are at the time—was suddenly enjoying an unexpected intellectual renaissance.
Had the Iranian protests succeeded, it seems fairly certain that “The Victory of Tweets” would be too good of a chapter title to go to waste. Indeed, at some point in June 2009, if only for a brief moment, it seemed as if history might be repeating itself, ridding the West of yet another archenemy—and the one with dangerous nuclear ambitions. After all, the streets of Tehran in the summer of 2009 looked much like those of Leipzig, Warsaw, or Prague in the fall of 1989. Back in ’89, few in the West had the guts or the imagination to believe that such a brutal system—a system that always seemed so invulnerable and determined to live—could fall apart so peacefully. Iran, it seemed, was giving Western observers the long-awaited chance to redeem themselves over their dismal performance in 1989 and embrace the Hegelian spirit of history before it had fully manifested itself.
Whatever the political and cultural differences between the crowds that were rocking Iran in 2009 and the crowds that rocked Eastern Europe in 1989, both cases seemed to share at least one common feature: a heavy reliance on technology. Those in the streets of Eastern Europe did not yet have BlackBerries and iPhones, but their fight was, nevertheless, abetted by technologies of a different, mostly analogue variety: photocopiers and fax machines, radios tuned to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, video cameras of Western television crews. And while in 1989 few outsiders could obtain immediate access to the most popular antigovernment leaflets or flip through clandestine photos of police brutality, in 2009 one could follow the Iranian protests pretty much the same way one could follow the Super Bowl or the Grammys: by refreshing one’s Twitter page. Thus, any seasoned observers of foreign affairs—and particularly those who had a chance to compare what they saw in 1989 to what they were seeing in 2009—knew, if only intuitively, that the early signs coming from the streets of Tehran seemed to vindicate the Google Doctrine. With that in mind, conclusions about the inevitable collapse of the Iranian regime did not seem so far-fetched. Only a lazy pundit would not have pronounced Iran’s Twitter Revolution a success when all the signs were suggesting the inevitability of Ahmadinejad’s collapse.
The Unimaginable Consequences of an Imagined Revolution
It must have been similar reasoning—at times bordering on hubris—that led American diplomats to commit a terrible policy blunder at the height of the Iranian protests. Swayed by the monotony of media commentary, the flood of Iran-related messages on Twitter, or his own institutional and professional agendas, a senior official at the U.S. State Department sent an email to executives at Twitter, inquiring if they could reschedule the previously planned—and now extremely ill-timed—maintenance of the site, so