The Net Delusion

"Yes it is. The Net Delusion is a very important corrective to what I refer to as the “Kumbaya ideology” of the Internet – that somehow the Internet is going to solve all our problems, in particular in democratisation. By that account, you could talk about the Blackberry messaging system that was of huge benefit to the demographic will expressed in the burning buildings in Tottenham, Enfield and Liverpool this month. The reason why India and the United Arab Emirates are so keen on having a Blackberry server inside their countries is that they don’t want people’s emails to be immune from being read. But the real fear of the UAE is not that they can’t monitor their own citizens but that the Americans, with privileged access to RIM servers [Research in Motion, Blackberry’s developer], can. Now, I don’t think any country is likely to allow complete freedom on the Internet. My main thesis is that we’re seeing the emergence of a large number of intranets – national intranets which are defined in their own way, rather in the way that national law defines freedom of the press or otherwise. That’s now happening digitally with the Internet as well. Evgeny points out how the hope and optimism of the Internet led people to make irrational and nonsensical analyses of what was actually going on in the world. Of course, Evgeny knew all about this because he comes from Belarus. He picked up very quickly on how Lukashenko was able to monitor what was going on in the opposition in Belarus, simply by looking at people’s Facebook pages or the equivalent thereof. This book was a very important corrective, which was then pooh-poohed because of the Arab Spring, and in particular what happened in Egypt. But I think this in itself needs to be understood. The point about the Arab regimes, and Egypt in particular, is that although they absorbed information from the Internet they had a very weak Internet monitoring team. And because Egypt was a gerontocracy, they had not really understood the implications of how dangerous the Internet could be unless you take it under your own control. So Egypt actually confirmed what Evgeny was saying, which is that regimes – dictatorships in particular although it’s also very relevant to democracies – are deciding how much control they want over the web. My feeling is that ever more governments will be seduced in their desire – either in the name of political control or in the name of intellectual property rights – to basically seize ever greater parts of the Internet, and to monitor it in a more effective fashion. We’ve certainly been seeing that quite dramatically over the last couple of years. Not entirely. In Egypt, control and monitoring of the Internet, and understanding of what the implications of the Internet are, were at a relatively low level. And so people were able to exploit Twitter and so on, in order to promote a successful revolution. The same was true in Tunisia as well. Having said that, networking has not had a role at all in Libya, or a very limited role relative to Egypt and Tunisia. Then there are places like China, where it’s all rather a grey area. If on the one hand you pronounce from Beijing that anti-corruption strategies are a great thing, then you mustn’t be too surprised when citizens use the Internet in order to highlight local corruption. This will create a dilemma. With each scandal that emerges in China – as the derailed high-speed train in Wenzhou demonstrated – even while the government says “there will be no more writing about this incident”, they have not successfully stopped it. As I understand it there are lively discussions on the blogs. What is interesting is that it’s not just a full-blown “we will control the Internet”. There is an ambiguity as to what’s happening in China which is very interesting."

"Well the Morozov book is more about some of the issues that are still very deeply embedded in the emerging world. It’s not about the decline of the West, it’s about how social media tools are being used in the emerging world. I’m surprised at how some people have been quite dismissive of Morozov’s essential and fundamental point. I think it’s a brilliant insight, from a very young author from Belarus who lives in the West. Some people tend to dismiss his ideas because we live in a world where people believe what they want to believe. It’s like the aid world – everyone wants to believe that giving money to Africa helps. Everybody wants to believe that social media have been the reason why Iran, Egypt and other places have had uprisings. The author speaks convincingly as someone from one of the emerging economies. To paraphrase him, he is saying “I’m from one of these countries. Here is how social media tools actually impact a country and its political landscape and infrastructure. It doesn’t always work like you think it does, and its effects are not universally positive.” Exactly. And every government does it. The Washington Post ran a story about six months ago about how the US government bought every single copy of a book that was being published by a former US marine. The book had some details that may be construed as government secrets. Few picked up on the story, but clearly the US government intervened and censored in a way that you might not expect in a Western society. We can point at China, but it’s something governments do all over the world, albeit to varying degrees."