if its advocacy were limited to pursuing social rather than political ends. Whether the West needs to politicize blogging and view it as a natural extension of dissident activity is certainly a complex question that merits broad public debate. But the fact that this debate is not happening at the moment does not mean that blogging is not being politicized, often to the point of no return, by the actions—as well as declarations—of Western policymakers.
Furthermore, giving in to cyber-utopianism may preclude policymakers from considering a whole range of other important questions. Should they applaud or bash technology companies who choose to operate in authoritarian regimes, bending their standard procedures as a result? Are they harbingers of democracy, as they claim to be, or just digital equivalents of Halliburton and United Fruit Company, cynically exploiting local business opportunities while also strengthening the governments that let them in? How should the West balance its sudden urge to promote democracy via the Internet with its existing commitments to other nondigital strategies for achieving the same objective, from the fostering of independent political parties to the development of civil society organizations? What are the best ways of empowering digital activists without putting them at risk? If the Internet is really a revolutionary force that could nudge all authoritarian regimes toward democracy, should the West go quiet on many of its other concerns about the Internet—remember all those fears about cyberwar, cybercrime, online child pornography, Internet piracy—and strike while the iron is still hot?
These are immensely difficult questions; they are also remarkably easy to answer incorrectly. While the Internet has helped to decrease costs for nearly everything, human folly is a commodity that still bears a relatively high price. The oft-repeated mantra of the open source movement—“fail often, fail early”—produces excellent software, but it is not applicable to situations where human lives are at stake. Western policymakers, unlike pundits and academics, simply don’t have the luxury of getting it wrong and dealing with the consequences later.
From the perspective of authoritarian governments, the costs of exploiting Western follies have significantly decreased as well. Compromising the security of just one digital activist can mean compromising the security—names, faces, email addresses—of everyone that individual knows. Digitization of information has also led to its immense centralization: One stolen password now opens data doors that used not to exist (just how many different kinds of data—not to mention people—would your email password give access to, if compromised?).
Unbridled cyber-utopianism is an expensive ideology to maintain because authoritarian governments don’t stand still and there are absolutely no guarantees they won’t find a way to turn the Internet into a powerful tool of oppression. If, on closer examination, it turns out that the Internet has also empowered the secret police, the censors, and the propaganda offices of a modern authoritarian regime, it’s quite likely that the process of democratization will become harder, not easier. Similarly, if the Internet has dampened the level of antigovernment sentiment—because people have acquired access to cheap and almost infinite digital entertainment or because they feel they need the government to protect them from the lawlessness of cyberspace—it certainly gives the regime yet another source of legitimacy. If the Internet is reshaping the very nature and culture of antigovernment resistance and dissent, shifting it away from real-world practices and toward anonymous virtual spaces, it will also have significant consequences for the scale and tempo of the protest movement, not all of them positive.
That’s an insight that has been lost on most observers of the political power of the Internet. Refusing to acknowledge that the Web can actually strengthen rather than undermine authoritarian regimes is extremely irresponsible and ultimately results in bad policy, if only because it gives policymakers false confidence that the only things they need to be doing are proactive—rather than reactive—in nature. But if, on careful examination, it turns out that certain types of authoritarian regimes can benefit from the Internet in disproportionally more ways than their opponents, the focus of Western democracy promotion work should shift from empowering the activists to topple their regimes to countering the governments’ own exploitation of the Web lest they become even more authoritarian. There is no point in making a revolution more effective, quick, and anonymous if the odds of the revolution’s success are worsening in the meantime.
In Search of a Missing Handle
So far, most policymakers choose to be sleepwalking through this digital minefield, whistling their favorite cyber-utopian tunes and refusing to confront all the evidence. They have also been