The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
Evgeny Morozov
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 1610391063
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Updated with a new Afterword
“The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran. But as journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov argues in The Net Delusion, the Internet is a tool that both revolutionaries and authoritarian governments can use. For all of the talk in the West about the power of the Internet to democratize societies, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. Social media sites have been used there to entrench dictators and threaten dissidents, making it harder—not easier—to promote democracy.
Marshalling a compelling set of case studies, The Net Delusion shows why the cyber-utopian stance that the Internet is inherently liberating is wrong, and how ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of “Internet freedom” are misguided and, on occasion, harmful.
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Parents’ house on a popular Chinese site. (Her family had to go into hiding.) It may be that what we gain in the ability to network and communicate, we lose in the inevitable empowerment of angry online mobs, who are well-trained to throw “data grenades” at their victims. This may be an acceptable consequence of promoting Internet freedom, but we’d better plan ahead and think of ways in which we can protect the victims. It’s irresponsible to put people’s lives on the line while hoping we can.
Do with excessive restrictions that oppressive governments place on free speech. The easy availability of circumvention technology should not preclude policymakers from more ambitious—and ultimately more effective—ways of engagement. Otherwise, both Western and authoritarian governments get a free pass. Democratic leaders pretend that they are once again heroically destroying the Berlin Wall, while their authoritarian counterparts are happy to play along, for they have found other effective ways.
Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Social Research 64, no. 3 (1997): 965-988. McFarland, F. B. “Clarence Ayres and His Gospel of Technology.” History of Political Economy 18, no. 4 (1986): 617. McLoughlin, I., R. Badham, and P. Couchman. “Rethinking Political Process in Technological Change: Socio-Technical Configurations and Frames.” Technology Analysis &.
Cyber-utopianism is not very eventful, but the date January 21, 2010, has a guaranteed place in its annals—probably right next to Andrew Sullivan’s blog posts about Twitter’s role in Tehran. For this was the day when the sitting U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, went to the Newseum, America’s finest museum of news and journalism, to deliver a seminal speech about Internet freedom and thus acknowledge the Internet’s prominent role in foreign affairs. The timing of Clinton’s speech could.
Most effective system of Internet control is not the one that has the most sophisticated and draconian system of censorship, but the one that has no need for censorship whatsoever. The Kremlin’s growing online entertainment empire may explain why there is little formal censorship in Russia—the Kremlin doesn’t ban access to any of its opponents’ websites, with the minor exception of those created by terrorists and child molesters—and yet surprisingly little political activity. Russia.ru, with its.