history of postcommunist Eastern Europe suggests otherwise. By infusing policymakers with excessive optimism, the Cold War metaphors thus result in a certain illusory sense of finality and irreversibility. Breaching a powerful firewall is in no way similar to the breaching of the Berlin Wall or the lifting of passport controls at Checkpoint Charlie, simply because patching firewalls, unlike rebuilding monumental walls, takes hours. Physical walls are cheaper to destroy than to build; their digital equivalents work the other way around. Likewise, the “cyber-wall” metaphor falsely suggests that once digital barriers are removed, new and completely different barriers won’t spring up in their place—a proposition that is extremely misleading when Internet control takes on multiple forms and goes far beyond the mere blocking of websites.
Once such language creeps into policy analysis, it can result in a severe misallocation of resources. Thus, when an editorial in the Washington Post argues that “once there are enough holes in a firewall, it crumbles. The technology for this exists. What is needed is more capacity,” it’s a statement that, while technically true, is extremely deceptive. More capacity may, indeed, temporarily pierce the firewalls, but it is no guarantee that other, firewall-free approaches won’t do the same job more effectively. To continue using the cyber-wall metaphor is to fall victim to extreme Internet-centrism, unable to see the sociopolitical nature of the problem of Internet control and focus only on its technological side.
Nowhere is the language problem more evident than in the popular discourse about China’s draconian system of Internet control. Ever since a 1997 article in Wired magazine dubbed this system “the Great Firewall of China,” most Western observers have relied on such mental imagery to conceptualize both the problem and the potential solutions. In the meantime, other important aspects of Internet control in the country—particularly the growing self-policing of China’s own Internet companies and the rise of a sophisticated online propaganda apparatus—did not receive as much attention. According to Lokman Tsui, an Internet scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, “[the metaphor of ] the ‘Great Firewall’ ... limits our understanding and subsequent policy design on China’s internet. ... If we want to make a start at understanding the internet in China in all its complexity, the first step we need to take is to think beyond the Great Firewall that still has its roots in the Cold War.” Tsui’s advice is worth heeding, but as long as policymakers continue their collective exercise in Cold War nostalgia, it is not going to happen.
Why Photocopiers Don’t Blog
Anachronistic language skewers public understanding of many other domains of Internet culture, resulting in ineffective and even counterproductive policies. The similarities between the Internet and technologies used for samizdat—fax machines and photocopiers—are fewer than one might imagine. A piece of samizdat literature copied on a smuggled photocopier had only two uses: to be read and to be passed on. But the Internet is, by definition, a much more complex medium that can serve an infinite number of purposes. Yes, it can be used to pass on antigovernment information, but it can also be used to spy on citizens, satisfy their hunger for entertainment, subject them to subtle propaganda, and even launch cyber-attacks on the Pentagon. No decisions made about the regulation of faxes or photocopiers in Washington had much impact on their users in Hungary or Poland; in contrast, plenty of decisions about blogs and social networking sites—made in Brussels, Washington, or Silicon Valley—have an impact on all the users in China and Iran.
Similarly, the problem with understanding blogging through the lens of samizdat is that it obfuscates many of the regime-strengthening features and entrenches the utopian myth of the Internet as a liberator. There was hardly any pro-government samizdat in the Soviet Union (even though there was plenty of samizdat accusing the government of violating the core principles of Marxism-Leninism). If someone wanted to express a position in favor of the government, they could write a letter to the local newspapers or raise it at the next meeting of their party cell. Blogs, on the other hand, come in all shapes and ideologies; there are plenty of pro-government blogs in Iran, China, and Russia, many of them run by people who are genuinely supportive of the regime (or at least some of its features, like foreign policy). To equate blogging with samizdat and bloggers with dissidents is to close one’s eyes to what’s going on in the extremely diverse world of new media across the globe. Many bloggers are actually