RSA Animate - The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

Does the internet actually inhibit, not encourage democracy? In this new RSA Animate adapted from a talk given in 2009, Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative take on 'cyber-utopianism' - the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics.

Exposing some idealistic myths about freedom and technology (during Iran's 'twitter revolution' fewer than 20,000 Twitter users actually took part), Evgeny argues for some realism about the actual uses and abuses of the internet.

We have heard a lot of stories

about the impact of the Internet on protest movements,

heard a lot about the information revolution

and how it's transforming

countries like China, countries like Iran

even many of the countries from the former Soviet Union.

And, you know, the assumption so far has been that

the Internet is basically a very good thing

when it comes to promoting democracy.

So, many of these illusions

were put together in the mid-nineties

by thinkers, which I can only call cyberutopians.

People who really believe in the
transformative power of the Web to change societies

and to change them for the better.

The most famous quote was that

if social networking and blogging was around

in the early nineties

the genocide in Rwanda wouldn't have happened.

Which is now very often quoted to illustrate

this very naive view that many people had back at the time.

So, many of the people who still believe in this really think

that blogs are more or less what faxes and Xerox machines

were in the late eighties,

where the great dissident movements

in Poland and Eastern Europe

really embraced this technology, right?

So, essentially, this argument

is about economics and logistics.

The Internet and new media have a made it really cheap

for people to produce content and, of course, the activists

and the NGO's will inevitably use this technology

in order to push for reform and change, right?

So, you know, if you really want to sum-up this view

it basically says that if you have enough connectivity

and enough devices, democracy is almost inevitable.

And that explains why we have seen

so many pushes to, you know, get China online, get Iran online, get Russia online,

make sure that people have enough connectivity,

make sure that people know what blogging is,

make sure people know what connectivity is,

and somehow, although no one explains how exactly,

these people will use these tools

to ask for more democracy, and, you know, cooperate together, and push for more stuff.

And, you know, one of the things which, pundits have developed, in this particular view,

is iPod liberalism.

It's this belief that people who have iPods

or any other sort of modern Western technology

will also be very likely to support Western values and Western democracy, right?

So the assumption here is that if you give

all Chinese or Iranians or Russians, you know, enough iPods, or enough laptops,

or enough, you know, fax machines, they would all somehow, on their own, aspire

to democratic change, right?

And, of course, this would make a fascinating, you know,

title for a column by Thomas Freidman, you know,

"Drop iPods, Not Bombs"

But, you know, this is rarely a good sign, right?

It's a view which essentially disregards

a lot of political, cultural, sociological forces

we try to place on these societies

and embraces a very deterministic picture

of the role that technology plays, right?

And the main confusion here is due to the fact that

we actually tend to confuse the intended uses

of technology with the actual uses, right?

Just like we want to think that, you know, radio, for example,

can help establish democracy in, you know, countries like the Soviet Union,

which it partly did, you know.

It was also used very actively during the very Rwandan genocide that, you know, we wanted to avert.

We have, as I've mentioned previously, somewhat of a myth that certain leaders and dictators

somehow fear the Internet, that they fear technology.

And again, if you really look very closely at how government leaders are trying to sort of reach out

to their different citizens and Internet users.

That's actually not the case.

Pretty much across the board, with the exception probably of North Korea and Burma,

authoritarian leaders are actually very actively engaging with technology, computers, you know, and so forth.

And, you know, sometimes they do allow debate around issues which are not political.

They do allow debate around some more political issues like climate change.

All that is happening; it's just that it's not happening with issues like human rights, for example.

So you can see that there is criticism in Chinese blogs.

It's actually there is much more criticism than non criticism.

You know, it's both of national and local governments.

The question then is: why does the government tolerate it?

First, it's to generate information that the government needs to run the country.

Most of these bureaucrats in the government in Russia, China, Iran, or elsewhere,

they operate in huge information vacuums. They don't really know fully what's happening in the outter regions.

So for them having people blog and having people voluntarily

provide information about what may be wrong with some local issues is actually quite helpful.

Because that will help them to crackdown on local corruption and bad behavior.

You know, and go actually fix some of the problems which, may not be political in nature,

but which may help them to, you know, survive into the next, you know, century.

It just helps them achieve legitimacy, right?

So for them, sort of having this fake opening up in cyberspace is actually very useful

because it reduces tension, and it convinces some people, at least, that yes, they are willing to consider

outside views and opinions.

Some of this is happening slightly differently

in other countries.

See now they may be still spinning it, but they are also trying to leverage the support of their users

online in cyberspace, right?

So, for example, in Thailand there's a very interesting site called "Protect the King."

It was started by one of their members in parliament,

which basically encourages users, you know Internet users,

to go and start submitting links to websites which they may find offensive to the king.

So you can basically go and nominate any of the websites that you don't like

and it will be, almost within 24 hours, blocked,

and then you need to go through a very complex procedure to unblock it.

And then because there a very severe Lese-majesty laws in Thailand that works very well.

Once they launched it then in 24 hours it was like 3,000 websites blocked.

And then there are a lot of loyalists who are actually very happy to contribute their knowledge and tips and whatnot

to have those websites censored.

The same is happening in Saudi Arabia

where Internet users are encouraged to go and search

YouTube for videos which may offend Saudi sensibilities.

And then to nominate them for deletion.

And then if that particular video accumulates a critical mass

then YouTube will have to delete them;

they will have to consider deleting it

because so many people have complained.

So there are organized campaigns actually to try to go

and influence the decisions of the western companies on this issue.

How the Iranian authorities, after the protests are now, you know, slowing down,

are actually looking at all the online evidence trail left on Facebook and Twitter.

They actually go and start cracking down on people who were active on cyberspace, right?

So now, one of their initiatives now is actually putting online the pictures of protesters

on the street so that they can actually be identified.

So they're crowd-sourcing this process of matching faces to names, right?

And, of course, you can guess what's gonna happen once they know who the protesters were.

There are a lot of dangers and fears which we do not entirely understand at this point.

What you don't realize is that Twitter, despite all its virtues,

is actually a public platform, right?

And if you do want to plan a revolution on Twitter,

your actions will be visible to everyone.

In the past, states used to torture to get this kind of data.

I mean now all they have to do is just get on Facebook.

[crowd laughing]

If you want to know how I am as an activist in a country like Belarus or Iran,

I'm connected to twenty-thousand other activists.

All they have to do is go look up my Facebook friends.

My final point here would be again about the cyberutopian assumption that somehow the younger generation,

which has not been subject to brainwashing,

which is all about digital media, mobile phones,

Blackberries, and laptops will somehow be prone to, you know, a revolution,

will be prone to embrace democratic values.

The problem here again is that we hear it quite a lot about cyber activism, right?,

but we hear very little about what I call the cybercriminal, right?,

where young people may not necessarily be that crazy

about participating in any political actions,

but they're always online because of all the good things

that the Internet has to offer.

Adult content, which is pornography,
instant messaging, and email

still occupies proportionally much more space

than politics or news.

And, again, you have to keep it perspective that most

of what young people do online revolves around, you know, them communicating to each other

or downloading entertainment, right?

And it's not at all clear how they will advance to this level of actually being politically active.

What if it wouldn't get them into the streets?

This is something which we don't see discussed very often.

You know, we hear a lot about this distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants.

What we don't hear about is the distinction between digital renegades and digital captives,

which I think is much more important one because we need to know how exactly

technology influences their civic engagement,

and their propensity to actually go and engage in protest.

You have to go back to Maslow and actually start thinking about how this pyramid of needs

can actually be applied to cyberspace.

It may as well be that when you are bringing Internet to China, Russia, or Iran,

at the very beginning what people will want to do online is,

you know, have fun, you know, explore pornography, or YouTube, or videos of funny cats,

and move on to talking and sharing and some will want to go and explore learning.

Eventually they may want to campaign.

Some of them will go and start downloading a word from humans rights watch,

but most of them will still be downloading pornography,

and that's a very important perspective to keep in mind.

If you really want to understand the actual net impact or net effect of technology on society,

then you have to look much broader, in fact, and view the negative consequences, as well.