It’s been a demoralising political summer for the Internet’s social media idealists. The early promise of a democratic Twitter powered revolution in Iran has been replaced by a series of bleak lessons in digital realpolitik. A summer that began so optimistically on the noisy, crowded streets of Tehran, is ending in the silent gloom of a co-ordinated global Internet campaign against a lone Georgian blogger.
Back in June, it seemed that real-time social networks like Twitter and Facebook could help co-ordinate an effective democratic resistance to the authoritarian Ahmadinejad regime. But today, little remains of that optimism except the rather pathetic symbolism of Twitter’s green tinged user-photographs and those dwindling band of western opponents of the current Iranian government who still claim their location as “Tehran”.
Meanwhile, life has rampaged elsewhere on the Internet’s real-time stream. Iran got bumped from Twitter’s trending topics first by Michael Jackson’s sudden death, then by the dramatic Twitter and Facebook outages earlier this month, and now, of all things, by the NHS, which has become a lightening rod in America for and against attacks on Obama’s health care proposals.
The failure of Obama to successfully revitalise his once powerful Internet base to confront Republican resistance to his health care plan has underlined the logistical challenges of maintaining a digitally distributed political organisation. Much more ominous news, however, for Internet idealists who regard social media tools as naturally effective weapons against authoritarian governments, were the disturbing circumstances behind the Twitter and Facebook outages of the 6th and 7th August.
Initially greeted by the inconvenienced social media world as the work of Las Vegas hackers or Ahmadinejad sympathisers, it soon became clear that Twitter and Facebook had been downed by a professionally organised and substantially financed denial-of-service plot to silence a Georgian nationalist blogger called “Cyxymu”. Social media’s supposedly democratic networking tools had been turned on their authoritarian head. Rather than providing citizens with a collective voice against tyranny, digital technology had instead become the means of suppressing free speech and persecuting a solitary social media activist.
The digital war against “Cyxymu”, which many western analysts believe originated from Moscow, is symptomatic of the way in which authoritarian governments are leveraging the latest networking technology to silence and harass their enemies. Yesterday, a nine page report by an American non-profit group called US Cyber Consequences Unit (USCCU) revealed that Russian hackers had used Microsoft software as well as exploiting social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to launch cyber attacks against the Georgian government in last year’s August war. These attacks were so effectively orchestrated that they successfully not only sabotaged the websites of Georgia’s President and its National Bank, but also brought down most of the country’s media organisations.
One of the few Western Internet analysts who has consistently warned about this dismal digital scenario is Evgeny Morozov now a fellow of New York’s Soros backed Open Society Institute and a prolific Foreign Policy magazine blogger. . So I Skyped with Morozov yesterday to understand what 2009’s demoralising summer for Internet idealists teaches us about the political realities of the internet.
“I’m trying to bring some realism to this conversation,” he told me, before going through a depressing litany of examples of how the Internet is being used to “subvert democracy”. From Putin’s dirty cybertrick department to Chinese individuals who are paid by the Beijing regime to engage in online conversation with dissidents to Iranian government sponsored blogging workshops in religious seminaries, Morozov argued that authoritarian regimes have successfully appropriated the tools of social media for their own anti democratic ends. There’s nothing intrinsically liberalising about the Internet, the Belarus born Morozov told me. Like any kind of media technology – such as Stalin’s propagandistic use of television or the Nazi exploitation of radio – it is easily subverted by political dictatorship.
But it’s the soft cultural power of the Internet – something he describes as an “opium of the masses” – which Morozov fears as much as Big Brother. Paraphrasing Huxley’s Brave New World rather than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Morozov believes that the Internet is engendering a “cyber hedonistic climate” in authoritarian countries like Saudi Arabia which allows governments to trade social or sexual online freedom with their citizens in exchange for restricting basic political rights.
So who is to blame for idealising the democratising nature of the internet? It’s not just Internet activists like MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte who Morozov blames for misrepresenting the Internet’s liberalising and globalising potential. Western politicians, Morozov argued, are “the real culprits” of our political love affair with digital technology because they view social media as a low cost and low risk substitute for traditional foreign policy action.
Morozov singled out the “naïve” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as epitomising the “naïve” politician who sees social media networks as a way of manufacturing dissent in authoritarian societies. Critiquing Brown’s TED conference speech in Oxford last month in which he gave a speech entitled “Wiring a Web for global good”, Morozov – who also spoke at TED – argued that Brown is wrong to believe that we are at a “unique moment” in history when social networking and blogging will guarantee against such crimes against humanity as the genocide in Rwanda. Yet, as Morozov argued, both the recent genocide in Congo and the war in Iraq happened in spite of the existence of social networking and blogging.
So what should you and I be doing – how can we personally use the Internet to help spread democracy? Morozov argued that it’s “not enough” for us to simply join a Facebook group about freedom in Iran or China and then assume that democracy will magically appear. As political activists, we need to transform ourselves from idealists into realists and do our homework systematically and comprehensively about the complexity of authoritarian societies.
A common techno-utopianism certainly played a role in this year’s demoralising political summer and Yevgeny Morozov is correct to call for a new realism about the impact of social media on authoritarian societies. Ironically, his digital brand of realpolitik may ultimately be the most effective strategy for making the world a more democratic place. (Via Telegraph)