Elective Affinities. The Moldovan audience knows media researcher Evgeny Morozov in at least two different hypostases. First, as a news-media missionary, Morozov knocked about the former soviet countries, including Moldova, where he organized a series of trainings, lessons and workshops on the use of new technologies - blogs, social networks, wiki-type portals - in journalism, the public arena and civil society, in particular. The typical audience of these workshops consisted of journalists and activists, meaning people that can make a change. In this position, Evgeny Morozov did not differ at all from dozens of other international consultants who come to Moldova or any other country in this region, trying to familiarize local staff with the solutions that worked in other parts of the world.
The other one (Evgeny Morozov–Moldova relationship) is infinitely much more important, as it had several exciting consequences. This relation originated on a specific date - 7 April 2009, 2:15 p.m. (Washington time), or 9:15 p.m. (Chisinau time). It is the time when the Moldova’s Twitter Revolution (1) post was placed in Morozov’s personal blog at the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine.
In his post, Morozov integrated the Moldovan protest in a series of similar events and actions that took place in Ukraine (The Orange Revolution) and Belarus (the 2006 Revolts), where the technological element - cell phones, social networks - allegedly played a decisive role. Still underway, the bluff of Chisinau (2) found an international name. That post both represented the birth of the mythology of technology-mediated revolutions and generated a conceptual term, which still has a brilliant career in political studies and mass media: Twitter Revolution (3). Sometimes journalists, as well as politicians and expert, used this term to describe the unrests in Iran (2010), Tunisia (2010-2011) and Egypt (2011).
The physical and symbolic location of the one who invented a new concept counted a lot: this time Morozov was not a mere trainer, but a serious analyst working for an influential publication focused on international relations analysis.
Forget everything I told you before!
For those expecting Evgeny Morozov to become after 2009 a loud and enthusiastic voice promoting the democratic transformation of the world with the help of modern technologies, his book The Net Delusion, published in 2011, came as a cold shower. As well as a disappointment: the Morozov of 2011 criticizes the Morozov before 2009. The pragmatic guy calls down the idealist one.
That is why reading of the personal key seems more than plausible. In many places the book seems rather like a public self-exorcism, upon the completion of which the enthusiastic guy, who announced Freedom through the Internet, got freed from this blindness, rather than a cold-mind-analysis of the political implications of the Internet technology.
The personal key is perhaps responsible for a certain unilaterality of the book: Morozov insists exclusively on the problematic sides of technologies - manipulation, escapism, naivety, and consumerism. It is of course true, but only partially. Because there is the other side to the Internet, blogs, and social networks - liberating, community-building, and change-promoting.
At the analytical level, Evgeny Morozov considers critically two political attitudes. The first one is the so-called Google Doctrine. It refers to the enthusiastic belief in the liberating power of technology and economic success (p. xiii). The second attitude is the Cyber-utopianism, meaning that online communication is in itself emancipatory and acts in a single direction: dismantling oppressive structures and authoritarian regimes. According to the author, both attitudes were assumed by the US administration, due to different reasons, and were integrated in the foreign policy agenda of the United States.
Morozov refers mainly to a series of remarks on Internet Freedom made by Hillary Clinton in January 2010. The US Secretary of State praised the peace-making potential of online technologies: “Information freedom supports the peace and security that provides a foundation for global progress. We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights.” (4)
Clinton also declared that she hopes that “viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.”
Later, the US administration took several times a stance regarding Internet freedom, criticizing the censorship policies applied by the Chinese Government, Russian authorities or governance of some Arabic countries. Apparently innocent, suggests Morozov, this naive belief of US decision-makers in the liberating potential of the Internet is responsible for several errors already, which could compromise the entire goal.
First, the use of such metaphors as ‘electronic samizdat’ or ‘the new Iron Curtain’ makes references to the cold war times. This rhetoric, claims Morozov, is based on a mistaken view of the USSR collapse and the underlying causes. In the opinions of Washington politicians and experts, the winners of the cold war, the Soviet Union fell down under the joint influence of the samizdat and some media efforts of the West, first the Radio Free Europe, as well as Voice of America or BBC, which represented sources of quality information for Soviet citizens.
However, Morozov argues, this vision is rather a suitable post factum reconstruction, as things should have been, and not as they were in reality. The USSR, as well as the entire system of satellite states set up by Moscow, collapsed under the pressure of complex constellations of economic, social and political factors, where the samizdat had a marginal influence, limited to only some social groups.
Second, justifies Morozov, Internet technologies entail evolutions that are not only complex, but also contradictory. Logical reductionism of the Internet to a single dynamic - the liberating on - ignores totally the adaptability of online technologies to various cultural, political and religious contexts. Internet tools bring power not only to the oppressed, but also to oppressors. As the old Chinese saying goes, the devil is in the details. Or, the attitude of the world countries towards the Internet should not be perceived only from the traditional perspective: censorship and control. Far from letting themselves be conquered by the liberating energies of the Internet, some authoritarian political regimes learned how to use and manipulate them according to their own interests.
This is what China does, for instance, when it pays to a series of informal agents: bloggers and activists who represent the Chinese Government in the online environment. They send spam messages, disseminate false information and denigrate the opponents. Or, the political leaders of some problematic states use the Internet as a platform for propaganda. This is the case of Dmitri Medvedev, blogger and user of social networks, or Hugo Chavez, very active on Twitter. Thus, the Internet is becoming a tool used by the political power to exert its dominance, impose its viewpoint and minimize the critics’ opinions.
Third, cyber-utopianism commits a factual mistake regarding the users/citizens themselves. The assumption that the online environment only has a liberating effect falls apart at the first encounter with reality. It is true that the virtual environment maintains some networks of activists that plead for democracy (in all its understandings) and human rights. It is also true that Facebook, Twitter and some portals have become live platforms hosting a kind of global e-society. On the other side, a range of world vices - nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, religious intolerances, racism and sexism - have successfully passed into the virtual world and were disseminated globally by the online technologies. Besides the global civil society, on the net one may find the global civil counter-society, dominated by reactionism and resentfulness. “Tweets will not dissolve all of our national, cultural, and religious differences; they may actually accentuate them.” (p. 247)
Other communities, which are religiously conservative, have resorted to voluntary self-isolation from the ocean of information in order to protect the minds and hearts of their members. The most well-known case of such a self-isolation is offered by a religious community from the US, which developed some software to block the access of their members to certain types of content that could undermine their faith (5).
Fourth, justifies Morozov, using the Internet for political purposes – organization, mobilization, discussion – is not the only way to navigate the Internet. Other ways, much more attractive and interesting, are much more widespread on the Internet. Consumerism, for instance. Or escapism. The latter refers to taking refuge in the virtual world in order to flee from the burden of the reality.
In case of consumerism, the things are much more complicated: entertainment is not only stealing people’s time, which could be used for political or community construction activities (hypothesis presented in the 1990’s by another American researcher, Robert Putnam (6), but decreases their interest in politics in general. Under socialism people, states Morozov nicely, “have such hapless apparatchiks running the entertainment industry. People got bored easily and turned to politics instead. Where new media and the Internet truly excel is in suppressing boredom... In a sense, the Internet has made the entertainment experiences of those living under authoritarianism and those living in a democracy much alike. Today’s Czechs watch the same Hollywood movies as today’s Belarusians— many probably even download them from the same illegally run servers somewhere in Serbia or Ukraine. The only difference is that the Czechs already had a democratic revolution, [...]. Meanwhile, the Belarusians were not as lucky”. (p.80)
(Post) Political Utopias
It would have been a mistake to regard the cyber-utopianism, attacked by Morozov, only as a variation of naive thinking. On the whole, those who made their money in Silicon Valley can be called whatever, but not naive or idealists. On the contrary, this type of thinking is inspired by a certain type of pragmatism with old roots in the political philosophies of the continent. Both the Google Doctrine and cyber-utopianism are the most legitimate heirs of the theories that announced in one way or another the arrival of the post-political era. That philosophic fashion had a number of names, technocratism being the best known one.
More recently, cyber-utopianism obtained new allies in the ideology on the End of Ideology (the term belongs to Daniel Bell) or End of History (Francis Fukyama).
In all these cases a good intention was implemented very badly. The good intention was to overcome the ideological separation, eliminate abuses and install some forms of democratic governance in accordance with human rights. The doctrine is inspired by the fear of recurrence of the horrors of ideological confrontations of the 20th century, from an elitist perspective on technology, believing that technology is not only apolitical, but as any supra-politics can condition and determine political developments.
The bad implementation relates to the fact that the conflict generated by the fear of politics and political is resolved mainly by ignoring totally or even annihilating the politics. Or, political divisions are real divisions and conflicts. And in the Internet epoch, ideological conflicts should be solved only through ideological polemics and understandings. Neither the Internet, nor any other technology can be a magic wand that would solve all social conflicts.
Instead of Conclusion
Eventually, any generalization in terms of the Internet risks being a poor and over-simplistic reflection of reality. Because the Internet is not a finite or closed process, but a universe (techno-political-economic-scientific formation) under development, whose future is still unclear. One thing is for sure: the Internet and related technologies will not produce social and political changes on their own, will not overcome totalitarian regimes and will not encourage political mobilizations. The technologies are not operated in a void, but in society. The virtual world cannot replace politics or economics. It is only their extension.
Footnotes.
1 http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution
2 A summary of the terminology polemics related to the events of 7 April 2009 can be found at: http://www.spranceana.com/2009/04/11/o-istorie-terminologica-a-crizei-moldovenesti/
3 “Twitter revolution” search on Google Scholar returns almost 80 thousand hits, with almost one thousand hits for “twitter revolution Moldova”.
Analyses of the Twitter Revolution in Moldova were published in such important magazines and newspapers as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and others.
4 The remarks can be read in full on the website of the US Department of State at http://www.state.gov
5 See here a case relates to the scientological cult http://www.xenu.net/archive/events/censorship/
6 See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).
This an English translation of a book review published in Mass Media in Moldova (December 2012), a journal published by the Independent Journalism Center, Chișinău.
