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The Net Delusion

The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

By Evgeny Morozov

Morozov focuses on the contraditions in attitudes towards the Internet. Morozov is interested in the Internet's political ramifications. "What if the liberating potential of the Internet also contains the seeds of depoliticization and thus dedemocratization?" he asks. The Net delusion of his title is just that. Contrary to the 'cyberutopians,' as he calls them, who consider the Internet a powerful tool of political emancipation, Morozov argues that, in freedom's name, the Internet more often than not constricts or even abolishes freedom.

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He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that "the revolution will be Twittered." The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media's favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: "This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media."

Two decades of inane patter about the magical powers of a technology of mere convenience had transformed Twitter - once the domain of "a bunch of bored hipsters who had an irresistible urge to share their breakfast plans," as Morozov mordantly writes - into an engine of political revolution. Or as Jon Stewart put it, mocking the belief in the Internet's ability to transform intractable places like Iraq and Afghanistan: "Why did we have to send an army when we could have liberated them the same way we buy shoes?"

The elements of a successful revolution - the complicity of the military, of a powerful political class, of an almost universally discontented population - simply weren't there. But the Internet boosters, from journalists to officials in the State Department, succumbed, Morozov says, to "the pressure to forget the context and start with what the Internet allows." These people think only in terms of the Internet and are "deaf to the social, cultural and political subtleties and indeterminacies" of a given situation.

The Iranian regime used the Web to identify photographs of protesters; to find out their personal information and whereabouts (through Facebook, naturally); to distribute propagandistic videos; and to text the population into counterrevolutionary paranoia.

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Polygamy may be illegal in Turkey, but that doesn't stop Turkish villagers from using the Internet to find multiple wives. Mexican crime gangs use social networking sites to gather information about their victims. Russian neofascists employ the Internet to fix the positions of minorities in order to organize pogroms.












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