The net delusion

The internet is democratising and enriching the world, right? It’s happening now in the Middle East, isn’t it? No it isn’t, says Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, not as such. The Spectator has an interview with him over at the books blog (spectator.co.uk/blogs/books). He spoke to us about those liberal westerners, many of whom are close to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, whose utopian dreams ask far too much of the internet, and how their misguided analysis of global affairs is strengthening dictators not weakening them. Here is a flavour of what he had to say:

‘We have a very confused sense of how modern authoritarianism works. It works differently. You take Syria and Singapore and you could describe both of them as authoritarian, but it’s a situation where the word ‘authoritarian’ loses its meaning because politically, socially and culturally, Syria is so vastly different from Singapore. So we need to get a much better idea of how big countries, like Russia and China and possibly Iran, how did they manage to embrace globalisation and capitalism without embracing liberal democratic values. And how that transition happened, and how they sold it to their people, what makes them tick. Those questions are tackled very rarely – the dominant thinking in policy circles and some corners of academia is that capitalism necessarily brings democratisation, that people demand representation and rights. And who knows? Maybe that is happening in China. I don’t think it’s technology that’s confusing us, it’s the inability to come up with a coherent narrative to explain how, Russia and China essentially, are no longer the regimes that they were 20 years ago before the end of the Cold War. And since we cannot accept that the rules have changed, we still imagine Russia and China as they were in the 80s, and that is why we’re so excited about the internet. We think that the reason that the Russian and Chinese leaders are in power is because their people are coerced and that they are ignorant of human rights, the political situation. And we think that [they will rebel] the moment we give them access to the right information.’