Caught in the net

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov. PublicAffairs; 408 pages; $27.95. Published in Britain by Allen Lane as “The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World”; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHEN thousands of young Iranians took to the streets in June 2009 to protest against the apparent rigging of the presidential election, much of the coverage in the Western media focused on the protesters' use of Twitter, a microblogging service. “This would not happen without Twitter,” declared the Wall Street Journal. Andrew Sullivan, a prominent American-based blogger, also proclaimed Twitter to be “the critical tool for organising the resistance in Iran”. The New York Times said the demonstrations pitted “thugs firing bullets” against “protesters firing tweets”.

The idea that the internet was fomenting revolution and promoting democracy in Iran was just the latest example of the widely held belief that communications technology, and the internet in particular, is inherently pro-democratic. In this gleefully iconoclastic book, Evgeny Morozov takes a stand against this “cyber-utopian” view, arguing that the internet can be just as effective at sustaining authoritarian regimes. By assuming that the internet is always pro-democratic, he says, Western policymakers are operating with a “voluntary intellectual handicap” that makes it harder rather than easier to promote democracy.

He starts with the events in Iran, which illustrate his argument in microcosm. An investigation by Al-Jazeera, an international news network based in Qatar, could confirm only 60 active Twitter accounts in Tehran. Iranian bloggers who took part in the protests have since poured cold water on the “Twitter revolution” theory. But the American government's endorsement of the theory, together with the State Department's request that Twitter delay some planned maintenance that would have taken the service offline for a few crucial hours at the height of the unrest, prompted the Iranian authorities to crack down on social networks of all kinds. Iranians entering the country were, for example, looked up on Facebook to see if they had links to any known dissidents, thus achieving the very opposite of what American policymakers wanted.

The root of the problem, Mr Morozov argues, is that Western policymakers see an all-too-neat parallel with the role that radio propaganda and photocopiers may have played in undermining the Soviet Union. A native of Belarus, Mr Morozov (who has occasionally written for The Economist) says this oversimplification of history has led to the erroneous conclusion that promoting internet access and “internet freedom” will have a similar effect on authoritarian regimes today.

In fact, authoritarian regimes can use the internet, as well as greater access to other kinds of media, such as television, to their advantage. Allowing East Germans to watch American soap operas on West German television, for example, seems to have acted as a form of pacification that actually reduced people's interest in politics. Surveys found that East Germans with access to Western television were less likely to express dissatisfaction with the regime. As one East German dissident lamented, “the whole people could leave the country and move to the West as a man at 8pm, via television.”

Mr Morozov catalogues many similar examples of the internet being used with similarly pacifying consequences today, as authoritarian regimes make an implicit deal with their populations: help yourselves to pirated films, silly video clips and online pornography, but stay away from politics. “The internet”, Mr Morozov argues, “has provided so many cheap and easily available entertainment fixes to those living under authoritarianism that it has become considerably harder to get people to care about politics at all.”

Social networks offer a cheaper and easier way to identify dissidents than other, more traditional forms of surveillance. Despite talk of a “dictator's dilemma”, censorship technology is sophisticated enough to block politically sensitive material without impeding economic activity, as China's example shows. The internet can be used to spread propaganda very effectively, which is why Hugo Chávez is on Twitter. The web can also be effective in supporting the government line, or at least casting doubt on critics' position (China has an army of pro-government bloggers). Indeed, under regimes where nobody believes the official media, pro-government propaganda spread via the internet is actually perceived by many to be more credible by comparison.

Authoritarian governments are assumed to be clueless about the internet, but they often understand its political uses far better than their Western counterparts do, Mr Morozov suggests. His profiles in “The Net Delusion” of the Russian government's young internet advisers are particularly illuminating. Previous technologies, including the telegraph, aircraft, radio and television, were also expected to bolster democracy, he observes, but they failed to live up to expectations. The proliferation of channels means that Americans watch less TV news than they did in the pre-cable era. And by endorsing Twitter, Facebook and Google as pro-democratic instruments, the American government has compromised their neutrality and encouraged authoritarian regimes to regard them as agents of its foreign policy.

So what does Mr Morozov propose instead of the current approach? He calls for “cyber-realism” to replace “cyber-utopianism”, making it clear that he believes that technology can indeed be used to promote democracy, provided it is done in the right way. But he presents little in the way of specific prescriptions, other than to stress the importance of considering the social and political context in which technology is deployed, rather than focusing on the characteristics of the technology itself, as internet gurus tend to. Every authoritarian regime is different, he argues, so it is implausible that the same approach will work in each case; detailed local knowledge is vital. Yet having done such a good job of knocking down his opponents' arguments, it is a pity he does not have more concrete proposals to offer in their place.

With chapter titles and headings such as “Why the KGB wants you to join Facebook” and “Why Kierkegaard Hates Slacktivism” it is clear that Mr Morozov is enjoying himself (indeed, there may be a few more bad jokes than is strictly necessary). But the resulting book is not just unfailingly readable: it is also a provocative, enlightening and welcome riposte to the cyber-utopian worldview.