Book Review: The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Evgeny Morozov. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. xvi + 409 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978-1-58648-874-1.

“The Revolution Will Be Twittered,” wrote the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan in a blog post after “Green Revolution” protests began in Tehran in June 2009. Touting the inherent power of the Internet for fostering democratic change, Sullivan’s now infamous words fell on deaf ears as the Iranian government imposed harsh restrictions on internet access, reporting, and civil assembly in the wake of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sweep of the (contested) elections. Though the Internet and social media allowed protesters to act quickly, the very same tools granted state authorities access to records and ultimately the identities of opposition supporters. Where Western “cyber-utopianism”—the “naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside”—failed; repression, arrests, and violent censorship brought a rapid end to the Green Revolution. The spread of Internet access and Internet freedoms have become synonymous with democratic potential; however, the supposed democratizing power of the Internet has done little to shift social and political motives in any of the authoritarian regimes that remain. Why is the democratizing power of the Internet backfiring? Why does the Internet fail to convert all of its users to faithful supporters of democracy? These are questions Evgeny Morozov attempts to answer in his study of the darker sides of the Internet.

Morozov contends that Western policymakers overlooked the reality of “digital diplomacy,” failing to realize it requires the same if not greater scrutiny, consideration, and oversight as traditional diplomacy. The cyber-utopianism and internet centrism—a “philosophy of action that informs how decisions, including those that deal with democracy promotion, are made and how long-term strategies are crafted”—that typifies Western policymaking has been misinformed since the Cold War. Morozov is explicit in his challenge of the two major contenders for the title of the great liberator: United States President Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War by airing the emancipatory power of information (p. 49), nor did Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, or other Western radio and information technologies exercise similar power in destroying the Iron Curtain (p. 50). Instead, the Soviet Union was crippled from within after Glasnost’ granted access to the archives that provided facts and figures of Soviet atrocities.

“Liberation by facts,” as Morozov calls it, was far more imperative in felling the Soviet monolith than any Western information technology, or what Morozov dubs “liberation by gadgets.” The latter theory, which ascribes greater and greater democratizing power to technologies from the telegraph to today’s Internet, serves as a sobering history lesson in how regimes—from Western democracies to authoritarian strongholds in Belarus, Iran, or China—use the same technologies for controlling their respective societies. What is labeled as censorship in one political discourse is called advertising (Google as “marketing intelligence firm”, p. 164-65) or “cybersecurity” (state intervention in cyberspace to ensure lawlessness does not enter the real world, p. 219) in another. The raw truth is that new technologies that can ambitiously enhance civil society—state authority and global discourse, such as Twitter and Facebook, are also powerful tools for regimes to deeper entrench their cults of personality, their control over society, and provide another means for tracking down and silencing, by any means necessary, dissent.

Morozov takes this last point to its darkest conclusion by emphasizing the similarities between the West’s policies on the Internet with those of authoritarian regimes. Morozov’s “wicked fix” for the Internet and freedom is brief but seemingly logical. The task at hand for policymakers is to manage the differences among their political objectives effectively, the key to which is greater interaction and understanding. He notes that there is no silver bullet for authoritarianism (p. 319), so Western policymakers must find solutions based on interaction with those regimes while remaining true to their rhetoric and political objectives. Political actors must identify and use a mixture of small policy maneuvers to identify major (“wicked”) problems before they are mislabeled as minor (“tame”) and serve to undermine the Western cause for Internet freedom. Though Morozov’s conclusions are stimulating they fail to hit their mark due to his relentless—bordering on repetitive—criticisms of Western cyber-utopianism. Though his remarks are well-founded they distract and outweigh the brevity of his ultimate fix at the conclusion of the present volume. His analysis of social media, journalism, and the danger of voluntary information exposure are equally overshadowed. If these technologies and tools are under government surveillance, what is to be done? Morozov fails to elaborate on this point, instead placing too much emphasis on the infallibility of a “free” media (p. 264-5).

In summary, Morozov’s analysis of the darker sides of Internet freedom and the problems caused by rampant cyber-utopianism in the West are well-researched, well-founded, and stimulating. Though his conclusions often leave much to be desired the analysis that precluded them will serve researchers of information technology, mass media and new media, as well as students of censorship, political economy, and comparative studies of authoritarian and democratic regimes.