fervor of the 1990s, when former hippies, by this time ensconced in some of the most prestigious universities in the world, went on an argumentative spree to prove that the Internet could deliver what the 1960s couldn’t: boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, strengthen associational life, and serve as a bridge from bowling alone to blogging together. And if it works in Seattle, it must also work in Shanghai.
Cyber-utopians ambitiously set out to build a new and improved United Nations, only to end up with a digital Cirque du Soleil. Even if true—and that’s a gigantic “if”—their theories proved difficult to adapt to non-Western and particularly nondemocratic contexts. Democratically elected governments in North America and Western Europe may, indeed, see an Internet-driven revitalization of their public spheres as a good thing; logically, they would prefer to keep out of the digital sandbox—at least as long as nothing illegal takes place. Authoritarian governments, on the other hand, have invested so much effort into suppressing any form of free expression and free assembly that they would never behave in such a civilized fashion. The early theorists of the Internet’s influence on politics failed to make any space for the state, let alone a brutal authoritarian state with no tolerance for the rule of law or dissenting opinions. Whatever book lay on the cyber-utopian bedside table in the early 1990s, it was surely not Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Failing to anticipate how authoritarian governments would respond to the Internet, cyber-utopians did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance, and how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become. Instead most cyber-utopians stuck to a populist account of how technology empowers the people, who, oppressed by years of authoritarian rule, will inevitably rebel, mobilizing themselves through text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever new tool comes along next year. (The people, it must be noted, really liked to hear such theories.) Paradoxically, in their refusal to see the downside of the new digital environment, cyber-utopians ended up belittling the role of the Internet, refusing to see that it penetrates and reshapes all walks of political life, not just the ones conducive to democratization.
I myself was intoxicated with cyber-utopianism until recently. This book is an attempt to come to terms with this ideology as well as a warning against the pernicious influence that it has had and is likely to continue to have on democracy promotion. My own story is fairly typical of idealistic young people who think they are onto something that could change the world. Having watched the deterioration of democratic freedoms in my native Belarus, I was drawn to a Western NGO that sought to promote democracy and media reform in the former Soviet bloc with the help of the Internet. Blogs, social networks, wikis: We had an arsenal of weapons that seemed far more potent than police batons, surveillance cameras, and handcuffs.
Nevertheless, after I spent a few busy years circling the former Soviet region and meeting with activists and bloggers, I lost my enthusiasm. Not only were our strategies failing, but we also noticed a significant push back from the governments we sought to challenge. They were beginning to experiment with censorship, and some went so far as to start aggressively engaging with new media themselves, paying bloggers to spread propaganda and troll social networking sites looking for new information on those in the opposition. In the meantime, the Western obsession with the Internet and the monetary support it guaranteed created numerous hazards typical of such ambitious development projects. Quite predictably, many of the talented bloggers and new media entrepreneurs preferred to work for the extremely well-paid but largely ineffective Western-funded projects instead of trying to create more nimble, sustainable, and, above all, effective projects of their own. Thus, everything we did—with generous funding from Washington and Brussels—seemed to have produced the results that were the exact opposite of what my cyber-utopian self wanted.
It was tempting to throw my hands up in despair and give up on the Internet altogether. But this would have been the wrong lesson to draw from these disappointing experiences. Similarly, it would be wrong for Western policymakers to simply dismiss the Internet as a lost cause and move on to bigger, more important issues. Such digital defeatism would only play into the hands of authoritarian governments, who would be extremely happy to continue using it as both a carrot (keeping their populace entertained) and