the Internet is a new battleground for freedom and that, as long as Western policymakers could ensure that the old cyber-walls are destroyed and no new ones are erected in their place, authoritarianism is doomed.
Nostalgia’s Lethal Metaphors
But perhaps there is no need to be so dismissive of the Cold War experience. After all, it’s a relatively recent battle, still fresh in the minds of many people working on issues of Internet freedom today. Plenty of information-related aspects of the Cold War—think radio-jamming—bear at least some minor technical resemblance to today’s concerns about Internet censorship. Besides, it’s inevitable that decision makers in any field, not just politics, would draw on their prior experiences to understand any new problems they confront, even if they might adjust some of their previous conclusions in light of new facts. The world of foreign policy is simply too complex to be understood without borrowing concepts and ideas that originate elsewhere; it’s inevitable that decision makers will use metaphors in explaining or justifying their actions. That said, it’s important to ensure that the chosen metaphors actually introduce—rather than reduce—conceptual clarity. Otherwise, these are not metaphors but highly deceptive sound bites.
All metaphors come with costs, for the only way in which they can help us grasp a complex issue is by downplaying some other, seemingly less important, aspects of that issue. Thus, the theory of the “domino effect,” so popular during the Cold War, predicted that once a country goes communist, other countries would soon follow—until the entire set of dominoes (countries) has fallen. While this may have helped people grasp the urgent need to respond to communism, this metaphor overemphasized interdependence between countries while paying little attention to internal causes of instability. It downplayed the possibility that democratic governments can fall on their own, without external influence. But that, of course, only became obvious in hindsight. One major problem with metaphors, no matter how creative they are, is that once they enter into wider circulation, few people pay attention to other aspects of the problem that were not captured by the original metaphor. (Ironically, it was in Eastern Europe, as communist governments began collapsing one after another, that a “domino effect” actually seemed to occur. ) “The pitfall of metaphorical reasoning is that people often move from the identification of similarities to the assumption of identity—that is, they move from the realization that something is like something else to assuming that something is exactly like something else. The problem stems from using metaphors as a substitute for new thought rather than a spur to creative thought,” writes Keith Shimko, a scholar of political psychology at Purdue University. Not surprisingly, metaphors often create an illusion of complete intellectual mastery of an issue, giving decision makers a false sense of similarity where there is none.
The carefree way in which Western policymakers are beginning to throw around metaphors like “virtual walls” or “information curtains” is disturbing. Not only do such metaphors play up only certain aspects of the “Internet freedom” challenge (for example, the difficulty of sending critical messages into the target country), they also downplay other aspects (the fact that the Web can be used by the very government of the target country for the purposes of surveillance or propaganda). Such metaphors also politicize anyone on the receiving end of the information coming from the other side of the “wall” or “curtain”; such recipients are almost automatically presumed to be pro-Western or, at least, to have some serious criticisms of their governments. Why would they be surreptitiously lifting the curtain otherwise?
Having previously expended so much time and effort on trying to break the Iron Curtain, Western policymakers would likely miss more effective methods to break the Information Curtain; their previous experience makes them see everything in terms of curtains that need to be lifted rather than, say, fields that need to be watered. Anyone tackling the issue unburdened by that misleading analogy would have spotted that it’s a “field” not a “wall” that they are looking at. Policymakers’ previous experiences with solving similar problems, however, block them from seeking more effective solutions to new problems. This is a well-known phenomenon that psychologists call the Einstellung Effect.
Many of the Cold War metaphors suggest solutions of their own. Walls need to be destroyed and curtains raised before democracy can take root. That democracy may still fail to take root even if the virtual walls are crushed is not a scenario that naturally follows from such metaphors, if only because the peaceful