posts after the election to: (a) discussing a recent Internet conference, (b) posting a theater review, (c) describing a gigantic pie with “little cherries and peaches” spotted at a recent book fair, (d) reviewing Walt Whitman, and (e) posting a story about a man with two brains. (One could only hope that at least that last entry was an allegory meant to ridicule the Putin-Medvedev alliance.) This is definitely not what the famous Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko meant when he proclaimed that “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.”
This is hardly a promising environment for fighting the authoritarian chimera. All potential revolutionaries seem to be in a pleasant intellectual exile somewhere in California. The masses have been transported to Hollywood by means of pirated films they download from BitTorrent, while the elites have been shuttling between Palo Alto and Long Beach by way of TED talks. Whom exactly do we expect to lead this digital revolution? The lolcats?
If anything, the Internet makes it harder, not easier, to get people to care, if only because the alternatives to political action are so much more pleasant and risk-free. This doesn’t mean that we in the West should stop promoting unfettered (read: uncensored) access to the Internet; rather, we need to find ways to supplant our promotion of a freer Internet with strategies that can engage people in political and social life. Here we should talk to both heavy consumers of cat videos and those who follow anthropology blogs. Otherwise, we may end up with an army of people who are free to connect, but all they want to connect to is potential lovers, pornography, and celebrity gossip.
The environment of information abundance is not by itself conducive to democratization, as it may disrupt a number of subtle but important relationships that help to nurture critical thinking. It’s only now, as even democratic societies are navigating through this new environment of infinite content, that we realize that democracy is a much trickier, fragile, and demanding beast than we had previously assumed and that some of the conditions that enabled it may have been highly specific to an epoch when information was scarce.
The Orwell-Huxley Sandwich Has Expired
As the East German experience revealed, many Western observers like endowing those living under authoritarian conditions with magical and heroic qualities they do not have. Perhaps imagining these poor folks in a perpetual struggle against the all-seeing KGB rather than, say, relaxing in front of YouTube or playing Tetris is the only way for Western observers not to despair at their own inability to do much about the situation. Nevertheless, that this is how they choose to interpret the nature of political control under authoritarianism is not an accident. Much of Western thinking on this issue has been heavily influenced—perhaps even constrained—by two twentieth-century thinkers who spent decades thinking about the diffusion of power and control under democracy, communism, and fascism. George Orwell (1903-1950) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), both men of letters who managed to leave indelible marks on the world of modern political thought, have each offered us powerful and yet strikingly different visions for how modern governments would exercise control over their populations (those visions haunt millions of high school students who are to this day tasked with writing essays comparing the two). The presence of these two figures in modern public life is hard to miss: A day hardly goes by when someone in the media doesn’t invoke either man to make a point about the future of democracy or the history of totalitarianism, and it’s quite common to invoke both, as if one could fit any possible kind of political control in the spectrum between those two polar ends. Thus a shrewd Western politician would profess admiration of both (cue Hillary Clinton, who, when asked about books that influenced her the most, mentioned both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World in one breath).
Orwell’s 1984 (1949), his most famous work and certainly one of the best novels of the twentieth century, emphasizes pervasive surveillance and mind-numbing propaganda composed in the meaningless vocabulary of “Newspeak.” In Orwell’s world, citizens are not entitled to any privacy; hence they treasure junk and scraps of paper, as those lie outside of the sphere controlled by the government and remind them of a much different past. Even their television sets are used to monitor their behavior. Winston Smith, the protagonist, is warned that neurologists are working to extinguish the orgasm, as full devotion to the Party requires the