The Net Delusion

Expressions like "freedom recession" have begun to break out of the think-tank circuit and enter the public conversation. In a state of quiet desperation, a growing number of Western policymakers began to concede that the Washington Consensus—that set of dubious policies that once promised a neoliberal paradise at deep discounts—has been superseded by the Beijing Consensus, which boasts of delivering quick-and-dirty prosperity without having to bother with those pesky institutions of democracy.

The West has been slow to discover that the fight for democracy wasn't won back in 1989. For two decades it has been resting on its laurels, expecting that Starbucks, MTV, and Google will do the rest just fine. Such a laissez-faire approach to democratization has proved rather toothless against resurgent authoritarianism, which has masterfully adapted to this new, highly globalized world. Today 's authoritarianism is of the hedonism- and consumerism-friendly variety, with Steve Jobs and Ashton Kutcher commanding far more respect than Mao or Che Guevara. No wonder the West appears at a loss. While the Soviets could be liberated by waving the magic wand of blue jeans, exquisite coffee machines, and cheap bubble gum, one can't pull the same trick on China. After all, this is where all those Western goods come from.

Many of the signs that promised further democratization just a few years ago never quite materialized. The so-called color revolutions that swept the former Soviet Union in the last decade produced rather ambiguous results. Ironically, it's the most authoritarian of the former Soviet republics—Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan—that found those revolutions most useful, having discovered and patched their own vulnerabilities. My own birthplace, Belarus, once singled out by Condoleezza Rice as the last outpost of tyranny in Europe, is perhaps the shrewdest of the lot; it continues its slide into a weird form of authoritarianism, where the glorification of the Soviet past by its despotic ruler is fused with a growing appreciation of fast cars, expensive holidays, and exotic cocktails by its largely carefree populace.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were started, if anything, to spread the gospel of freedom and democracy, have lost much of their initial emancipatory potential as well, further blurring the line between "regime change" and "democracy promotion." Coupled with Washington's unnecessary abuses of human rights and rather frivolous interpretations of international law, these two wars gave democracy promotion such a bad name that anyone eager to defend it is considered a Dick Cheney acolyte, an insane idealist, or both.

It is thus easy to forget, if only for therapeutic purposes, that the West still has an obligation to stand up for democratic values, speak up about violations of human rights, and reprimand those who abuse their office and their citizens. Luckily, by the twenty-first century the case for promoting democracy no longer needs to be made; even the hardest skeptics agree that a world where Russia, China, and Iran adhere to democratic norms is a safer world.

That said, there is still very little agreement on the kind of methods and policies the West needs to pursue to be most effective in promoting democracy. As the last few decades have so aptly illustrated, good intentions are hardly enough. Even the most noble attempts may easily backfire, entrenching authoritarianism as a result. The images of horrific prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib were the result, if only indirectly, of one particular approach to promoting democracy. It did not exactly work as advertised.

Unfortunately, as the neoconservative vision for democratizing the world got discredited, nothing viable has come to fill the vacuum. While George Bush certainly overdid it with his excessive freedom-worshiping rhetoric, his successor seems to have abandoned the rhetoric, the spirit, as well as any desire to articulate what a post-Bush "freedom agenda" might look like.

But there is more to Obama's silence than just his reasonable attempt to present himself as anti-Bush. Most likely his silence is a sign of an extremely troubling bipartisan malaise: the growing Western fatigue with the project of promoting democracy. The project suffers not just from bad publicity but also from a deeply rooted intellectual crisis. The resilience of authoritarianism in places like Belarus, China, and Iran is not for lack of trying by their Western "partners" to stir things up with an expectation of a democratic revolution. Alas, most such Western initiatives flop, boosting the appeal of many existing dictators, who excel at playing up the threat of foreign mingling in their own affairs. To say that there is no good blueprint for dealing with modern authoritarianism would be a severe understatement.

Lost in their own strategizing, Western leaders are pining for something that has guaranteed effectiveness. Many of them look back to the most impressive and most unambiguous triumph of democracy in the last few decades: the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly—and who can blame them for seeking to bolster their own self-confidence?—they tend to exaggerate their own role in precipitating its demise. As a result, many of the Western strategies tried back then, like smuggling in photocopiers and fax machines, facilitating the flow of samizdat, and supporting radio broadcasts by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, are given much more credit than they deserve.

Such belated Cold War triumphalism results in an egregious logical fallacy. Since the Soviet Union eventually fell, those strategies are presumed to have been extremely effective—in fact, crucial to the whole endeavor. The implications of such a view for the future of democracy promotion are tremendous, for they suggest that large doses of information and communications technology are lethal to the most repressive of regimes.

Much of the present excitement about the Internet, particularly the high hopes that are pinned on it in terms of opening up closed societies, stems from such selective and, at times, incorrect readings of history, rewritten to glorify the genius of Ronald Reagan and minimize the role of structural conditions and the inherent contradictions of the Soviet system.

It's for these chiefly historical reasons that the Internet excites so many seasoned and sophisticated decision makers who should really know better. Viewing it through the prism of the Cold War, they endow the Internet with nearly magical qualities; for them, it's the ultimate cheat sheet that could help the West finally defeat its authoritarian adversaries. Given that it's the only ray of light in an otherwise dark intellectual tunnel of democracy promotion, the Internet's prominence in future policy planning is assured.

And at first sight it seems like a brilliant idea. It's like Radio Free Europe on steroids. And it's cheap, too: no need to pay for expensive programming, broadcasting, and, if everything else fails, propaganda. After all, Internet users can discover the truth about the horrors of their regimes, about the secret charms of democracy, and about the irresistible appeal of universal human rights on their own, by turning to search engines like Google and by following their more politically savvy friends on social networking sites like Facebook. In other words, let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom. By this logic, authoritarianism becomes unsustainable once the barriers to the free flow of information are removed. If the Soviet Union couldn't survive a platoon of pamphleteers, how can China survive an army of bloggers?

It's hardly surprising, then, that the only place where the West (especially the United States) is still unabashedly eager to promote democracy is in cyberspace. The Freedom Agenda is out; the Twitter Agenda is in. It's deeply symbolic that the only major speech about freedom given by a senior member of the Obama administration was Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom in January 2010. It looks like a safe bet: Even if the Internet won't bring democracy to China or Iran, it can still make the Obama administration appear to have the most technologically savvy foreign policy team in history. The best and the brightest are now also the geekiest. The Google Doctrine—the enthusiastic belief in the liberating power of technology accompanied by the irresistible urge to enlist Silicon Valley start-ups in the global fight for freedom—is of growing appeal to many policymakers. In fact, many of them are as upbeat about the revolutionary potential of the Internet as their colleagues in the corporate sector were in the late 1990s. What could possibly go wrong here?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Once burst, stock bubbles have few lethal consequences; democracy bubbles, on the other hand, could easily lead to carnage. The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside. It stems from the starry-eyed digital fervor of the 1990s, when former hippies, by this time ensconced in some of the most prestigious universities in the world, went on an argumentative spree to prove that the Internet could deliver what the 1960s couldn't: boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, strengthen associational life, and serve as a bridge from bowling alone to blogging together. And if it works in Seattle, it must also work in Shanghai.

Cyber-utopians ambitiously set out to build a new and improved United Nations, only to end up with a digital Cirque du Soleil. Even if true—and that's a gigantic "if "—their theories proved difficult to adapt to non-Western and particularly nondemocratic contexts. Democratically elected governments in North America and Western Europe may, indeed, see an Internet-driven revitalization of their public spheres as a good thing; logically, they would prefer to keep out of the digital sandbox—at least as long as nothing illegal takes place. Authoritarian governments, on the other hand, have invested so much effort into suppressing any form of free expression and free assembly that they would never behave in such a civilized fashion. The early theorists of the Internet's influence on politics failed to make any space for the state, let alone a brutal authoritarian state with no tolerance for the rule of law or dissenting opinions. Whatever book lay on the cyber-utopian bedside table in the early 1990s, it was surely not Hobbes's Leviathan.

Failing to anticipate how authoritarian governments would respond to the Internet, cyber-utopians did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance, and how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become. Instead most cyber-utopians stuck to a populist account of how technology empowers the people, who, oppressed by years of authoritarian rule, will inevitably rebel, mobilizing themselves through text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever new tool comes along next year. (The people, it must be noted, really liked to hear such theories.) Paradoxically, in their refusal to see the downside of the new digital environment, cyber-utopians ended up belittling the role of the Internet, refusing to see that it penetrates and reshapes all walks of political life, not just the ones conducive to democratization.

I myself was intoxicated with cyber-utopianism until recently. This book is an attempt to come to terms with this ideology as well as a warning against the pernicious influence that it has had and is likely to continue to have on democracy promotion. My own story is fairly typical of idealistic young people who think they are onto something that could change the world. Having watched the deterioration of democratic freedoms in my native Belarus, I was drawn to a Western NGO that sought to promote democracy and media reform in the former Soviet bloc with the help of the Internet. Blogs, social networks, wikis: We had an arsenal of weapons that seemed far more potent than police batons, surveillance cameras, and handcuffs.

Nevertheless, after I spent a few busy years circling the former Soviet region and meeting with activists and bloggers, I lost my enthusiasm. Not only were our strategies failing, but we also noticed a significant push back from the governments we sought to challenge. They were beginning to experiment with censorship, and some went so far as to start aggressively engaging with new media themselves, paying bloggers to spread propaganda and troll social networking sites looking for new information on those in the opposition. In the meantime, the Western obsession with the Internet and the monetary support it guaranteed created numerous hazards typical of such ambitious development projects. Quite predictably, many of the talented bloggers and new media entrepreneurs preferred to work for the extremely well-paid but largely ineffective Western-funded projects instead of trying to create more nimble, sustainable, and, above all, effective projects of their own. Thus, everything we did—with generous funding from Washington and Brussels—seemed to have produced the results that were the exact opposite of what my cyber-utopian self wanted.

It was tempting to throw my hands up in despair and give up on the Internet altogether. But this would have been the wrong lesson to draw from these disappointing experiences. Similarly, it would be wrong for Western policymakers to simply dismiss the Internet as a lost cause and move on to bigger, more important issues. Such digital defeatism would only play into the hands of authoritarian governments, who would be extremely happy to continue using it as both a carrot (keeping their populace entertained) and a stick (punishing those who dare to challenge the official line). Rather, the lesson to be drawn is that the Internet is here to stay, it will continue growing in importance, and those concerned with democracy promotion need not only grapple with it but also come up with mechanisms and procedures to ensure that another tragic blunder on the scale of Abu Ghraib will never happen in cyberspace. This is not a far-fetched scenario. How hard is it to imagine a site like Facebook inadvertently disclosing the private information of activists in Iran or China, tipping off governments to secret connections between the activists and their Western funders?

To be truly effective, the West needs to do more than just cleanse itself of cyber-utopian bias and adopt a more realist posture. When it comes to concrete steps to promote democracy, cyber-utopian convictions often give rise to an equally flawed approach that I dub "Internet-centrism." Unlike cyber-utopianism, Internet-centrism is not a set of beliefs; rather, it's a philosophy of action that informs how decisions, including those that deal with democracy promotion, are made and how long-term strategies are crafted. While cyber-utopianism stipulates what has to be done, Internet-centrism stipulates how it should be done. Internet-centrists like to answer every question about democratic change by first reframing it in terms of the Internet rather than the context in which that change is to occur. They are often completely oblivious to the highly political nature of technology, especially the Internet, and like to come up with strategies that assume that the logic of the Internet, which, in most cases, they are the only ones to perceive, will shape every environment that it penetrates rather than vice versa.

While most utopians are Internet-centrists, the latter are not necessarily utopians. In fact, many of them like to think of themselves as pragmatic individuals who have abandoned grand theorizing about utopia in the name of achieving tangible results. Sometimes, they are even eager to acknowledge that it takes more than bytes to foster, install, and consolidate a healthy democratic regime.

Their realistic convictions, however, rarely make up for their flawed methodology, which prioritizes the tool over the environment, and, as such, is deaf to the social, cultural, and political subtleties and indeterminacies. Internet-centrism is a highly disorienting drug; it ignores context and entraps policymakers into believing that they have a useful and powerful ally on their side. Pushed to its extreme, it leads to hubris, arrogance, and a false sense of confidence, all bolstered by the dangerous illusion of having established effective command of the Internet. All too often, its practitioners fashion themselves as possessing full mastery of their favorite tool, treating it as a stable and finalized technology, oblivious to the numerous forces that are constantly reshaping the Internet—not all of them for the better. Treating the Internet as a constant, they fail to see their own responsibility in preserving its freedom and reining in the ever-powerful intermediaries, companies like Google and Facebook.

As the Internet takes on an even greater role in the politics of both authoritarian and democratic states, the pressure to forget the context and start with what the Internet allows will only grow. All by itself, however, the Internet provides nothing certain. In fact, as has become obvious in too many contexts, it empowers the strong and disempowers the weak. It is impossible to place the Internet at the heart of the enterprise of democracy promotion without risking the success of that very enterprise.

The premise of this book is thus very simple: To salvage the Internet's promise to aid the fight against authoritarianism, those of us in the West who still care about the future of democracy will need to ditch both cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism. Currently, we start with a flawed set of assumptions (cyber-utopianism) and act on them using a flawed, even crippled, methodology (Internet-centrism). The result is what I call the Net Delusion. Pushed to the extreme, such logic is poised to have significant global consequences that may risk undermining the very project of promoting democracy. It's a folly that the West could do without.

Instead, we'll need to opt for policies informed by a realistic assessment of the risks and dangers posed by the Internet, matched by a highly scrupulous and unbiased assessment of its promises, and a theory of action that is highly sensitive to the local context, that is cognizant of the complex connections between the Internet and the rest of foreign policymaking, and that originates not in what technology allows but in what a certain geopolitical environment requires.

In a sense, giving in to cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism is akin to agreeing to box blindfolded. Sure, every now and then we may still strike some powerful blows against our authoritarian adversaries, but in general this is a poor strategy if we want to win. The struggle against authoritarianism is too important of a battle to fight with a voluntary intellectual handicap, even if that handicap allows us to play with the latest fancy gadgets.