Morozov has built a reputation as a sharp and sometimes caustic critic of the internet and "cyber-utopianism" and Net Delusion expands the arguments he's made elsewhere. I read my review copy with interest; I like Evgeny — the times we've met and corresponded, he's struck me as smart and committed. At its core, there is some very smart stuff indeed in The Net Delusion. Morozov is absolutely correct when he forcefully points out that technology isn't necessarily good for freedom — that it can be used as readily to enslave, surveil, and punish as it can to evade, liberate and share.
Unfortunately, this message is buried amid a scattered, loosely argued series of attacks on a nebulous "cyber-utopian" movement, whose views are stated in the most general of terms, often in the form of quotes from CNN and other news agencies who are putatively summing up some notional cyber-utopian consensus. In his zeal to discredit this ideology whatever it is , Morozov throws whatever he's got handy at anyone he can find who supports the idea of technology as a liberator, no matter how weak or silly his ammunition.
Morozov begins with an effort to set the record straight on the role of Twitter in the recent Iranian elections. Twitter was widely reported as crucial to the on-the-ground oppositional effort in Iran, but subsequently, it became clear that Iranians in Iran are only peripherally involved with Twitter, though they used many other network tools and these were, indeed central to the reaction to the Iranian election.
Morozov then thoroughly documents the fact that many of the three million Iranian expats are indeed active on Twitter, and that their traffic, along with sympathetic messages from non-Iranian users, made the Iranian election and its aftermath into major phenomena on Twitter.
He also documents the close connections that these expats have with their families in Iran, using other tools such as Facebook. But then he fails to conclude from this that the news from Twitter may have jumped to Facebook and vice versa through these Iranians abroad, instead choosing to portray the roaring traffic of millions of Iranian expats on Twitter as being so isolated from their close relations on Facebook as to be practically irrelevant.
But not entirely irrelevant. Morozov goes on to quote Golnaz Esfandiari, a Radio Free Europe Iran correspondent, in "deploring Twitter's pernicious complicity in allowing rumours to spread" in Iran during the crisis.
I was shocked to read this in Morozov's work: how could Twitter be "complicit" in spreading rumours — did Esfandiari or Morozov expect internet services to pro-actively censor user contributions before allowing them to go live on their networks? And if so, did Morozov believe that Twitter would be better at supporting internet freedom if it appointed itself an censor?
I was so baffled by this that I emailed Morozov to ask what, exactly, the reader was supposed to make of it. Morozov told me that he thought that Esfandiari had been speaking loosely; she meant that Twitter's users were "complicit" in spreading rumours. This is certainly better, but without some evidence that Twitter is uniquely suited to spreading false rumours, it's hardly an indictment of Twitter, leaving me wondering why it's in the book at all, especially as Morozov spent the previous pages arguing that nothing from Twitter made its way into Iran — unless it's part of the throw everything and see what sticks approach to discrediting "cyber-uptopians".
And I think it is: later, Morozov blames "internet culture" for the "persistence of many urban myths," a profoundly weird idea, given that scholars of urban myths such as Jan Brunvand have found that many of today's urban legends originate in the middle ages and have proven amply fecund without the need for the internet as a breeding medium.
Morozov is skeptical of technology's capacity to foment revolution and spread democracy. Free access to information isn't necessary or even important to toppling corrupt regimes, he says — this is a shibboleth of Reaganites and their sentimental view of Samizdat, Radio Free Europe and other cold war information efforts. The Soviet Union didn't fall because of political organising, brave dissidents, or photocopied zines — it fell because it was a badly run nightmare that lurched from crisis to crisis until it imploded.
Indeed, free access to foreign media — such as was enjoyed by citizens of the GDR who were able to tune into West German broadcasts — often acted to diffuse anti-authoritarian sentiment, anaesthetising East Germans with such efficiency that even the Stasi came to sing the praises of decadent western TV. Ironically, Morozov here agrees — unwittingly perhaps, but vigorously — with his ideological opponents such as Clay Shirky, the NYU professor whom Morozov singles out for a great deal of condemnation.
Shirky's work — most recently The Cognitive Surplus — comes to exactly the same conclusion about traditional western media, especially TV. Shirky holds that TV served primarily to numb us to the crushing boredom that accompanied the surge of leisure time that arose in the early days of the information age.
In Shirky's view, the internet is exciting precisely because it is the antidote to that passive viewing experience, a mechanism for luring people into participation through a series of ever-greater commitments. Morozov doesn't engage this argument in any depth, though. Indeed, when he finally addresses the internet on its own, separate from mobile phone networks, year-old TV broadcasts, and other media, he does so only to scoff at "technology gurus" who "reveal their own historical ignorance" when they engage in "quasi-religious discourse about the power of the internet".
He supports this caricature with a few of the dumbest quotes cherry-picked from the last two decades of "internet discourse," but neatly ignores all the serious work on the history of the net as distinct from other media — notably, he fails to mention or address the arguments raised in Timothy Wu's excellent The Master Switch that was published last year.
Wu, a law and communications scholar, carefully and devastatingly traces out the history of media regulation in response to potential decentralisation of communications oligarchies and monopolies, and places the internet in a context that establishes its credentials as a genuinely novel phenomenon. Morozov knows that the internet is different, of course — he even says so, discussing the way that the net can mimic and overtake other media, and the problems this creates.
This failure to engage with the best thinking and writing on the subject of the internet's special power to connect and liberate is Net Delusion's most serious demerit. When Morozov talks about the security risks arising from dissidents' use of Facebook — which neatly packages up lists of dissidents to be targeted by oppressive nations' secret police — he does so without ever mentioning the protracted, dire warnings of exactly this problem that have come from the "cyber-utopian" vanguard as embodied by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NetzPolitik, Knowledge Ecology International, Bits of Freedom, Public Knowledge, and dozens of other pressure groups, activist organisations and technical projects around the world.
Indeed, there is hardly any mention at all of history's most prominent internet freedom fighters, such as the venerable cypherpunks movement, who have spent decades building, disseminating and promoting the use of cryptographic tools that are purpose-built to evade the kind of snooping and network analysis he rightly identifies as being implicit in the use of Facebook, Google and other centralised, private tools to organise political movements.
Though Morozov is correct in identifying inherent security risks in the use of the internet by dissidents, his technical analysis is badly flawed. In arguing, for example, that no technology is neutral, Morozov fails to identify one crucial characteristic of cryptographic systems: that it is vastly easier to scramble a message than it is to break the scrambling system and gain access to the message without the key.
Practically speaking, this means that poorly resourced individuals and groups with cheap, old computers are able to encipher their messages to an extent that they cannot be deciphered by all the secret police in the world, even if they employ every computer ever built in a gigantic, decades-long project to force the locks off the intercepted message.
In this sense, at least, the technological deck is stacked in favour of dissidents — who have never before enjoyed the power to hide their communiques beyond the reach of secret police — over the state, who have always enjoyed the power to keep secrets from the people.
Morozov's treatment of security suffers from further flaws. It is a truism among cryptographers that anyone can design a system so secure that he himself can't think of a way of breaking it this is sometimes called "Schneier's Law" after cryptographer Bruce Schneier. This is why serious information security always involves widespread publication and peer-review of security systems.
This approach is widely accepted to be the best, most effective means of identifying and shoring up defects in security technology. And yet, when Morozov recounts the tale of Haystack, a trendy, putatively secure communications tool backed by the US state department that was later found to be completely insecure, he accepts at face value the Haystack creator's statement that his tool was kept secret because he didn't want to let Iranian authorities reverse-engineer its workings real security tools work even if they have been reverse-engineered.
Instead, Morozov focuses his criticism on the "release early, release often" approach to free and open source software, and mocks the aphorism "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," though if these had been applied to Haystack, it would have been revealed as a failure long before it got into the hands of Iranian activists.
While people are getting their nails done they can ask us questions about trans stuff, or we can just have a chat. Though my activism, in general, is still primarily physical and IRL with my Nail Transphobia pop-ups, I am limited to the number of people I can talk to, one manicure can take 20 minutes and the pop-ups only last for a couple of hours.
Whereas I can post the same messages I have in conversations with the 30 people who come to the pop-up on my Instagram and speak to my 30 thousand followers all at once.
In terms of working towards the goals of the BLM — abolition, criminal justice reform, and decriminalization — how much does an Instagram story matter? To Nicole Cardoza, the founder of Anti-Racism Daily , a daily newsletter and Instagram account that seeks to dismantle systemic oppression with tangible actions, the answer to that question is: a lot. In her perspective, a culture of wokeness allows more daily interaction with civics and motivates people to become more educated.
The sheer accessibility alone gives pretty much anyone the power to amplify their voices for change, as well as crucial access to information on rallies, protests, and events in their area. The statistics are on her side. Others have used social media for advocacy or to find information about nearby rallies or protests to attend.
This activism, though possibly performative, may be somewhat effective in instilling an environment of broad political consciousness in the short term, drawing social media activists away from their screens towards more concrete actions. However, other social media activists are still skeptical. Spreading information is one but there also needs to be an action component, too — donations or setting up events and discussions. Sometimes social media activism treats these movements like a trend.
But though there are a lot of trend-chasers performing wokeness without actually believing in it, social media has moved many more people to take tangible action in the BLM Movement.
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