Since early 2011 there have been significant changes in North Africa and the Middle East. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had ruled Tunisia for 20 years, and Hosni Mubarak reigned in Egypt for 30 years. Yet their bravest challengers were 20- and 30-year-olds without ideological baggage, violent intentions, or clear leaders. Political change in these countries inspired activists across the region. Some tough authoritarian governments responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, others with policy concessions, welfare spending, and cabinet shuffles. The groups that initiated and sustained protests had few meaningful experiences with public deliberation or voting, and little experience with successful protesting. These young citizens were politically disciplined, pragmatic, and collaborative. Where did they come from? How do young people growing up in modern, entrenched, authoritarian regimes find political inspirations and aspirations? Are digital media important parts of the contemporary recipe for democratization?
Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion offers good illustrations of the ways in which authoritarian regimes have used information technology to constrain social movements. Doing so provides an important intellectual corrective to too much enthusiasm about the role of digital media in resistance to authoritarian rule. But the book comes at a time when current events in North Africa and the Middle East—and the growing research consensus—suggest that for the most part, the proliferation of information technologies has provided occasions for introducing democratic practices in surprising ways and unexpected places. Not everyone will agree that information technologies changed the opportunity structure for opposition, improved the logistics of protest organizing, or carried stories of success across North Africa and the Middle East to inspire other citizens to challenge their dictators. But it no longer seems delusional to contemplate the political consequences of the diffusion of Internet access and mobile phones. At the same time, Morozov's book offers important examples that undermine simplistic ways of thinking about the political effects of the new technologies, and scholars working on these issues will find his arguments well worth engaging.
Morozov makes several important points in forceful ways. First, most Internet content, in terms of bandwidth and hard drive space, is not dedicated to politics but to porn and illegally shared movies. Most online transactions involve shopping or entertainment, not interactions with candidates for political office. Digital media are rarely used for political content (though we have not been able to measure how this might be changing).
Second, digital media can also be key tools for regime propaganda, political surveillance, counterinsurgency and corporate espionage. These uses are on the rise, and only a few people (such as Ron Deibert at the University of Toronto) track their political consequences in systematic ways. Activists are not as safe as they might think, and may even weaken their movement by being too dependent on information technology. “The problem with most technological fixes,” Morozov writes, “is that they come with costs unknown even to their fiercest advocates” (p. 303). Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, mobile phones, and cloud computing all have technical limits and security vulnerabilities.
Third, efforts to craft a tech-savvy foreign policy have not gone very well. Morozov points out the absurdity of imposing economic sanctions that prevent some U.S.-based online services from being available in authoritarian regimes (for citizens' use) but of not regulating Silicon Alley's export of excellent censorship software (for dictators' use). On its own, encouraging internet access is not a sensible foreign policy goal. Some policymakers are just too gung-ho about technological solutions to social problems.
Yet it may be going too far to argue that having a social media strategy as part of a modern foreign policy is delusional. Public diplomacy can mean many things with regard to specific bilateral relations. But the Internet is now one of the primary means by which people in other countries keep in touch with family and friends living in the West, a supplementary means by which people expand their news diets with international content, and an important means by which middle-class youth develop a political identity. So it would be delusional not to work toward some integration of digital media in the program of statecraft and give even the most seasoned foreign policy experts a better understanding of the new media environment. Dismissing digital media altogether would be dangerous for foreign policy. Ignoring the role of digital media in contemporary political life means being out of tune with how young people form political identity, how civil society leaders organize, and how political communication is currently structured in media systems around the developing world.
Most technology use, most of the time, does not concern politics. But in times of military or political crisis, people do use information technologies in important ways. They check the news reported domestically with what is reported elsewhere, and they corroborate events with family and friends. Increasingly, people become their own media producers. What inspired many people to take to the streets in the summer of 2009 in Iran and in the Arab Spring of 2011 was not just the fact of stolen elections, but the personal stories of police abuse and government corruption that spread through digital media over social networks that criss-crossed the region.
If anything, this book demonstrates why scholarly research is important. One of the challenges of studying technology and politics is in the difficulty of adding it all up. Morozov is most systematic in pointing out the flaws in particular tools and software. And he assembles some of the most discouraging incidents of political debate and activism gone wrong. Most of the evidence is anecdotal, occasionally it is testimonial, but rarely is it systematic or analogical.
In an important way, current events do the most to undermine the overall arguments in The Net Delusion. For several years, experts and pundits were most worried about how terrorists used digital media to organize, promote hatred, and launch attacks on states and firms in the West. These things do happen, but at this point there are much more dramatic and high-impact cases of civil society groups, mainstream political parties, and journalists using information infrastructure in innovative ways. Digital media are part of the story of democratic entrenchment in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey. Sometimes, as in North Africa and the Middle East, digital media are used with surprising political effectiveness in rapid regime change.
Morozov is right to point out that several key firms—among them Facebook, Twitter, Google—do not fully appreciate the way they have become fundamental infrastructure for social movements. They cave in to government demands for filtering tools and back doors to software systems. He makes a convincing argument that any sensible theory of democratization should not be pegged to a particular piece of software or hardware. And he is right to point out that political scientists—and journalists—rarely have the technical literacy to be able to talk about the interaction of technology trends, telecommunications policy, and politics.
Political science, as a discipline, is generally afraid of studying information technology because doing so is difficult. We train graduate students to use statistical inference to explain variation in a sample of data, but only the smaller community of comparative and qualitative scholars have the methodological rigor to teach us about causal patterns with confidence. Only a few social scientists have the analytical tool kit to process terabytes of log files, understand the nuances of telecommunications policy, preserve network relations in data, and think philosophically about the causal role in which software and hardware provide capacities and constraints on human action. Studying information technology and politics requires that a researcher be good at the very least at two or three of these things. Morozov himself has several of these skills, and so here is why this book is important: It will inspire a new wave of research on information technology and politics because it so convincingly demonstrates that, in political terms, technology matters.
There are intriguing debates developing in journals like the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and a forthcoming Special Issue of the Journal of Communication. There are some ingenious new ways of collecting, organizing, and analyzing static, dynamic, and network data about technology and politics. Nonetheless, there is an urgent need to move beyond a few favored examples and longer-than-sound bite punditry. Morozov offers a string of casual examples to show how information technology can slow down group productivity or encourage self-promotion online, but does not advance our understanding of the process by which thousands of Tunisians, then Egyptians, then Algerians, Bahrianis, Jordanians, Moroccans, and so on mobilized with astounding political effect. Given the rising number of incidents in which digital media have become part of the narrative of social movement formation, regime change, and democratic entrenchment, it no longer seems misguided to explore the possibility of causal connections between technology diffusion and political outcomes.
The Net Delusion is an important book to read because every important debate needs naysayers, and this is the best statement yet against the growing consensus that information technology opens up new supplies of information about life in democratic countries for those living in dictatorship, that such technologies improve the capacity of social movement leaders to organize even more than improve the capacity of the state to repress, and that a young generation of citizens is having—once in a while—important exchanges of ideas through which they are developing their political identities. Morozov's book is an impressive catalog of all the depressing examples of unexpected consequences and disturbing side effects of technology diffusion. The subtitle is The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. It is always possible to compose an argument about the downside of freedom, but most people would still chose to have both freedom and the Internet. Morozov does not really convince us that we can have only one of these things.
What are the key ingredients in the modern recipe for democratization? How could democratic states make good foreign policy interventions and promote democratization elsewhere? Morozov convincingly argues that technology is not the answer. In the end, not many people argue that it is the only answer; most of us argue that the modern recipe for democratization is complex, with digital media one of several key ingredients. So even after finishing the book, most readers will retain the sense that digital media can be part of the answer to several contemporary questions in political science.
