But because there are a half dozen or so mistakes in the translation that makes me sound like I'm saying the opposite of what I actually said [fortunately fixed within a day!], and because not everybody reads Russian, I'm reprinting the original Russian questions and my answers in English below. I've asked them to make the corrections. I don't mind, because this is an important independent publication and I support its mission. I think they do a good job.
I'm not sure how they came to ask me, a person who is not a formal expert on the region, for such an extensive interview, but they did, perhaps in search of independent analysis.
Although I've spent a career of 35 years in this field where I have travelled extensively throughout Eurasia, and lived and worked in Russia and travelled frequently to Russia, Belarus, Poland in particular for OSCE, I have never been to a single Central Asian country. I worked in the Central Eurasian Program at OSI for six years without such a boon. It's not for any lack of desire; it just so happened that at different times when I was actually invited to go to Kyrgzystan when I worked with various human rights groups, or Kazakhstan when I was a public member at the OSCE, it simply happened that I couldn't go. I doubt I could get a visa to Turkmenistan, having written critically about it for OSI for six years, or Uzbekistan, where I also wrote critically for two years -- and of course before that, I edited two weeklies for RFE/RL and other publications for many years.
Even so, I study the regional Russian-language and English-language press very carefully, go to all the conferences I can, and interview people directly either when they visit the US, or when I see them at international conferences or over email and Skype. That's certainly not a substitute for a personal visit, where you can get the feel of things and have many important one-on-one conversations. But in lack of direct exposure on my skin of the winds of Central Asia, I'm no different than most pundits who have either never been there, or have been there only infrequently, and don't even speak any regional languages.
I do think there's an advantage to having a critical independent view of this critical region. I think those not in formal structures can speak out more loudly about the corrosive effect on human rights that the US and Europe have had; the ongoing pernicious role that Russia plays; and the troublesome future of Chinese domination -- not to mention the ways in which the oppressive autocratic regimes play these factors off against each other to keep themselves in power and their people miserable.
You have nothing to lose if your job does not depend on some certain perspective. I find that the status quo in the human rights movement is to minimize the threat of terror or unrest and play up the awfulness of the regimes. That's a whitewash, given the groups in the region that have many, many more thousands of adherents that Western-style human rights groups -- like Hizb-ut-Tahir.
As for Washington, I find that far from there being the "neo con" belief that a) there is rampant terrorism and a horrible threat of Islamization and/or b) some imminent "Arab Spring" coming, there is actually nothing of the sort. Oh, there's that one paper at Jamestown Foundation or something, but that's it.
That is, those on the left, the "progressives" and the "RealPolitik" adherents constantly pontificate as if there were some horrid neo-cons or hawks or conservatives saying these things, but in fact these groups, which have dwindling influence in any event, either are following RealPolitik themselves or don't even care at all about this region (mainly the latter).
So in my view, there is this whole fake industry of anti-anti commentary, which runs like this:
"There isn't any Islamic threat at all in this region, perish the thought, it's just a poor region with dictators who in fact go overboard suppressing legitimate Muslim activity"
"There's no Muslim fervour in fact, these states are Sovietized and secularized".
"Nothing is going to happen when troops leave, it is all wildly exaggerated and people who say that seem not to realize that the US troops are the conflict generator, not the IMU"
"Russia has little influence any more in this region; it has less gas extraction, it has less money, it has length troop strength and its efforts to make a Warsaw Pact -- the CSTO -- or a Soviet Re-Union with a customs union have mainly failed."
And so on.
While each one of those statements can be true up to a point, they also lead to this strange endorsement of the status quo in these regions that in fact ends up serving the regimes, in my view.
Russia's influence is considerable, and it has been behind unrest by its action (as it was in Bakiyev's ouster and its threats to Atambayev) or inaction (with the pogroms in Osh). The remittance economies are huge -- for the labour migrants from Tajikistan in particular, but increasingly Uzbekistan and even Turkmenistan. That means that Russia winds up dominating the lives of these countries through some of their most vulnerable citizens -- not just the mainly male workers but the females left back home as head of households with children. The Russian language did not disappear from this region, even if it is taught less, because dominating Russian mainstream media, and Russian-controlled social media like mail.ru and Vkontakte, are very big factors in the media space in this region.
As for terrorism, sure, it gets exaggerated and the regimes "do it to themselves". But there are also real terrorist acts that occur. There is a sense that the presence of US troops in Afghanistan has ensured a kind of "frozen conflict" in this region that isn't on the official list of the frozen conflicts. The IMU has been tied up mainly fighting NATO troops. So when they go away, then what? Where do they go, those 5000 or 8000 or however many fighters there are? (And probably there are analysts saying they are only 2000, but who really knows, what, you did a door-to-door survey, guys?) Will they peacefully melt back into the countryside and farm happily? Or what? I think it's okay to look at that question critically without being branded as a terrorism hysteric.
Ditto the question of "Arab Spring". No one thinks there is any Arab Spring coming to Central Asia. I don't know of a single pundit or analyst saying this. Yet again, there is the "anti-anti-" industry making this claim, mainly from the Registan gang. The problem is that when you adopt that scornful skepticism, you stop seeing reality when it appears. As Paul Goble put it, there is a way in which talking about the Arab Spring is a little spring in itself. And there are signs of unrest here and there, and you don't know how they will turn out.
Remember, the same gang at Registan -- Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce -- were predicting with firm determination that discussion of oppression on the Internet was causing a chill in use, a decline in use, and even the shuttering of popular discussion pages. They implied that there would never be any Twitter revolution in Azerbaijan, that it was going to be slow and incremental and we shouldn't artificially speed it up by over-amplifying human rights cases.
Yet thousands of people keep demonstrating in Azerbaijan despite the news of repression, and they keep using Internet tools to make their case -- tools that Pearce is now blithely measuring with machinopology as if she had never written that Internet use would be chilled by such expression. It hasn't been. Facebook membership boomed. Will this "spring" last forever? I truly doubt it. Not with potential European and American oil interests -- and actually existing Russian and Iranian oil interests -- in this mix. Everybody will blame the West for the crackdown in Azerbaijan that is likely to be inevitable and thorough, and fume at the regime-tropic USAID grantees that they ignored last year (or even cooperated with) as the smoking gun of American perfidy. But it will be Russia's money and military role that will be the bigger factor.
This is how I'm seeing it, in the end: To the extent Russian wants or needs conflict, or is weakened and can't efficiently prevent or manage conflict, there will be conflict in Central Asia after NATO troops are withdrawn.
Part of that resistance to Russian state intrusion will be Islamic ferment. If analysts were busy telling everyone these were secular Soviet states and Arab Spring can't happen, they will be uncomfortably confronted with the reality that Islam is a great organizing tool in countries where it has historic roots, and this need not be seen as a threat to the West. Yet because they've been engaged in such an industry telling us it's not a threat to the West, they will be embarrassed when in fact it will be -- as they emblematically were when the Egyptian woman activist just feted at the State Department turned out to be such an anti-American hater, 9/11 celebrator, and horrid anti-semite on Twitter, and not because she was hacked -- a fiction State had to indulge in to save face.
This is my little blog on Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays. I was travelling abroad and working on a project this last month so I missed two weeks, but I hope to be back on track. If you are reading this on TinyLetter you will have to come to my blog Different Stans for the links in RU and TJ as these are blocked by this mail system. Write me at [email protected] with comments or requests to be added to the mailing list.
HEADLINES
o US Secretary of State Visits Tajikistan
o Tajik President Calls on Army to Resist External Threats
o Journalist Stabbing a Warning for Tajik Opposition
COMMENTARY
Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. visited Dushanbe February 20-21 and met with President Emomali Rahmon. There is nothing on the US Embassy Dushanbe web site (yet) about this meeting, and only a picture on the Embassy Facebook page; very little anywhere else.
The independent Tajik press reported an alleged offer to make Tajikistan available for NATO equipment withdrawals, but the official did not seem very high level and later the same press reported just on the English-language page reported "Washington reprotedly does not plan to use Tajikistan’s infrastructure
during the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan." So the US seemed to be saying "thanks but no thanks". Too mountainous?
Into this vacuum of information steps a Russian analyst as usual, speculating that the purpose of Blake's trip was to shore up commitments from Dushanbe to let US and NATO military "obyekty" (installations) stay on the territory of Tajikistan. It's interesting that he doesn't say "troops," although there are some US "troops" in Tajikistan doing training and advising. He talks about the "obyekty" (facilities) which in a sense are what the US is already helping with by donating equipment.
The Russian analyst Anatoly Knyazev from the Institute for Oriental Studies believes the US will bribe officials and support a "thin layer" of students and nationalist intellectuals ("thin layer" is old Soviet Pravda parlance for a discredited social class not according to the Marxist-Leninist plan). This "thin layer" - the Oreo cookie filling smushed between Russia and the US and ready to be dipped into the milk of China (so I'm visualizing vividly now) is not really going to be allowed to succeed, as the US won't fund them, but they will be used to put pressure on Rahmon. Mkay.
Meanwhile, USAID is busy funding comic books in the Tajik language, so I don't think anyone's going to be colouring outside the lines...
Note that in the US photo op, Rahmon is smiling and the chandelier is featured. Note that in the Tajik photo op Rahmon is frowning and the wallpaper is featured. Also, note that the flower display at these things are always done beautifully.
The Tajik military parade last week provided an opportunity for Dushanbe to show off their hardware including some still-shiny Chaikas. Haven't seen those in awhile.
The trial of the suspect in the killing of the security official in Badakhshan last year has opened, and surprise, surprise, it's behind closed doors.
There was a bit of a kerfluffle with an Iranian presidential candidate speaking of a "Greater Iran" and Iran "taking back" Tajikistan, Armenian and Azerbaijan, but...well, when we saw the phrase "presidential candidate" we knew that this story couldn't be true, because those things are real in the Iranian dictatorship. Anyway, Ahmadineajad is coming to Dushanbe for the spring festival of Novruz in a few weeks and surely they'll sort things out. Meanwhile, we learn from RFE/RL and @eTajikistan that 29% of the 2000 plus foreign students in Tajikistan come from Iran.
U.S. Assistant Secretary for South and
Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake has called on Tajikistan's leadership
to hold a fair, democratic, and transparent presidential election in
November.
Blake started his two-day visit to Dushanbe on February 20 and has met with NGO representatives and civil-society activists.
No doubt this meeting had more people in it than Blake's meeting in Turkmenistan.
Assistant
Secretary of State for Central and South Asia Robert O. Blake, Jr. and
President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan, February 20, 2013. Photo by President.tj.
President.tj reports:
It was emphasized that the US continues to provide support to
Tajikistan's initiatives to intensify its struggle with terrorism,
extremism, unlawful narcotics trade, and to further assist in the
strengthening of the defense of the state borders with Afghanistan, and
material and technical provision of the relevant state agencies.
DUSHANBE, February 14, 2013, Asia-Plus -- Tajik Ambassador to the
United States, Nouriddin Shamsov, has called on Washington to remove
Tajikistan from Jackson-Vanik restrictions.
According to Silk Road Newsline, Ambassador Shamsov has noted that
Tajik economy shows steady progress, the country will officially join
the WTO on March 2, 20012 and it’s time for the United States to
graduate Tajikistan from the restrictive Jackson-Vanik amendment.
“My government anticipates continuing effective bilateral cooperation
with U.S. Government to lift as soon as possible the Jackson-Vanik
amendment which would impede as we do believe full fledged membership of
Tajikistan in the WTO and further promotion of bilateral trade and
investment relations with the Unites States of America,” Shamsov told a
panel on the WTO at the at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (CACI) in
Washington on February 13.
Tajikistan is ready to offer its territory for transit of freight by
international allied forces in Afghanistan, and there are no obstalces
regarding this issue. Davlat Nazriev, head of the Agency for
Information, Press Analysis and Foreign Policy Planning of the Foreign
Affairs of Tajikistan announced at a briefing.
"In the event of an appeal from any country, this question will be reviewed through the established procedures," he emphasized.
The purpose of Robert Blake's visit to Dushanbe is to obtain a final decision on the issue of deploying American and NATO military facilities on the territory of Tajikistan, since the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan has already begun, and the US immediately demands hard guarantees, says Aleksandr Knyazev, coordinator of regiona programs for the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Seciences, regnum.ru reported February 20.
In the expert's opinion, "It is still not too late for Russia to stop this process, otherwise before the end of this year, another process may be initiated regarding the withdrawal of the Russian military base from Tajikistan. Evidently the US is placing its bets on Rahmon according to the principle, 'he's a bastard but our bastard," and it's understandable that they are absolutely indifferent to the nation of this regime when it's a question of the strategic plans for deploying part of the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan in the countries of the region."
Knyazev sees the situation crudely -- bribes to key officials, and support for a "thin layer of Westernized youth" and some of the intelligentsia that are "nationalist-minded" and see the West as "the lesser of two evils". This "layer" will activate "numerous Western NGOs for 'colour scenarios', not to really bring them about but as "a lever of pressure on Rahmon".
The United States Embassy in Dushanbe, Export Control and Related
Border Security program (EXBS) and Office of Military Cooperation (OMC)
provided twenty-two All - Terrain Vehicles (ATV’s), thirty-three light
trucks and additional tactical equipment to the Government of
Tajikistan. The ATV’s will be distributed to border posts throughout
Tajikistan to assist Border Guard units in their efforts to combat
contraband from entering and transiting the country. The light trucks
and tactical equipment will similarly benefit Border Guard detachments,
outposts, and units, increasing their capacity for securing the Tajik
border from external threats.
Deputy Chief of Mission, Sarah Penhune participated in a donation
ceremony at the Border Guard Facility in Dushanbe. Ms. Penhune
remarked, “The United States Government shares the goals of the
Government of Tajikistan to combat the threat of contraband and drug
trafficking and recognizes that keeping Tajikistan’s borders secure is a
national priority. The Border Guards are the first line of defense for
Tajikistan from external threats, and they are frequently required to
carry out this important work with limited resources, in very difficult
terrain, and often during very challenging weather conditions. The U.
S. Embassy EXBS and OMC programs are pleased to assist the Border Guard
in their efforts to combat the threat of contraband and drug
trafficking.”
At a meeting to honour the 20th anniversary of Tajikistan's Armed Forces, the president called on the military and law-enforcement agencies to take into account growing "threats of modernity" such as terrorism, extremism and narcotics, regnum. ru and president.tj reported.
"I have noted many times and emphasize once again that security the security of the state and nation, protecting civilian life and the socio-economic development of the country directly depends on the political situation, law and order, guarantee of the rule of law, combatting crime and protecting our boarders," the news agency Avesta reported, citing the president.
A Russian human rights activist who has worked closely with Sattori suggests
[ru] that the assault on Sattori was a “political order,” and that the
journalist was punished for his ties with Quvvatov and his recent
attempts to mobilize international pressure in order to prevent the
politician's extradition to Tajikistan. It is unclear what the
journalist himself makes of the attack. In his interview with Radio
Ozodi, Sattori said [ru] he did not know whom to blame for an apparent attempt on his life. A bit later, however, he told [ru] BBC he knew who was behind the attack, suggesting also that this was a powerful person within the Tajik government.
A court in Ukraine has ruled that former Tajik Prime Minister Abdumalik
Abdullojonov can be held in detention for up to 40 days while
authorities await documents from Dushanbe regarding his possible
extradition.
Abdullojonov was arrested on February 5 at Boryspil Airport near Kyiv on
an international warrant after arriving from the United States.
Tajikistan's Foreign Ministry has made an official announcementi n which it has condemned the statement by Ayatollah Said Muhammad Bokiri Harrozi, a presidential candidate, that in the event that he becomes president of Iran, then Tajikistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan will be returned to Iran, news.tj reported.
The Foreign Minister noted that the statement appeared on http://cheshmandaz.org on February 5.
Ahmadinejad will visit Tajikistan in the last week of March to meet with the Tajik president, attend Novruz celebrations, and attend the launch of Sangtuda Hydropower Station No. 2
"They support democratic transitions in 'Kyrzakhstan' and Georgia,
mindful from our own experience that it takes a long time to get
democracy right, and that it rarely happens right away.”
In a telephone conversation Kerry also thanked Kazakhstan for agreeing to hold talks on Iran's nukes.
State.gov's transcript has it correctly as "Kyrgyzstan". But at about 30:14 or so on the video tape, you can hear Kerry make a slight muff of the name of this Central Asian country. Even so, the overall message in support of democracy, lest anyone think only the neo-cons will carry this torch, is clear:
We value human rights, and we need to tell the story of America’s
good work there, too. We know that the most effective way to promote the
universal rights of all people, rights and religious freedom, is not
from the podium, not from either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s from
the front lines – wherever freedom and basic human dignity are denied.
And that’s what Tim Kaine understood when he went to Honduras.
The brave employees of State and USAID – and the Diplomatic Security
personnel who protect the civilians serving us overseas – work in some
of the most dangerous places on Earth, and they do it fully cognizant
that we share stronger partnerships with countries that share our
commitment to democratic values and human rights. They fight corruption
in Nigeria. They support the rule of law in Burma. They support
democratic institutions in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, mindful from our own
experience that it takes a long time to get democracy right, and that it
rarely happens right away.
In the end, all of those efforts, all of that danger and risk that
they take, makes us more secure. And we do value democracy, just as
you’ve demonstrated here at UVA through the Presidential Precinct
program that’s training leaders in emerging democracies.
o Julie Judkins, representative of the Appalachian Trail, visited Tajikistan recently through a US program and spoke about the importance of community trails.
At least, not right now, and probably not next week.
Oh, there might be another wave of pogroms as there was in Osh in Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 where hundreds of people were killed, mainly Uzbeks, and thousands displaced, but it might be in some other setting, not Kyrgyzstan's south, but who knows, maybe Tajikistan, as police shoot-outs of suspected terrorists have occurred regularly there since the civil war was over.
Or there might be another massacre of workers as there were in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan in 2011, but probably not that again, and not there.
That's just it -- whenever unrest does break out, whether in Andijan in 2005 in Uzbekistan, where hundreds were massacred or in Osh as I mentioned in 2010, the authorities make sure it is tamped down very well after that, making numerous arrests, silencing or jailing journalists and bloggers and citizen reporters. So that's that, we get it.
Except, we don't. Because unrest does occur, sometimes with large numbers of people, and it surprises those who aren't prepared. Like the overthrow of Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan in 2012, which shows signs of Russian engineering, but which couldn't have succeeded if there hadn't been underlying social disatisfaction with energy price hikes (induced by Russia) and other deeper and long-term economic and social malaise.
Nobody was ready when 20,000 or even 60,000 people came out on the main squares of Moscow and other Russian cities after Putin's orchestrated re-election, and nobody who got enthusiastic about the prospects then was ready for the severity of the crackdown that is now inevitably coming.
So yeah, unrest, but they tamp it down but then, they don't. So you have to be ready, and you have to have some theory about how society changes in these countries -- and that would not be "due to Internet penetration" or "development of the middle class" -- the mantras rehearsed by State Department officials and pundits worldwide. If only Internet saturation reaches X point that it reached in, oh, Iran or Azerbaijan (where unrest is reaching the thousands now in demonstration), why we might see those droids we're looking for.
But oh, remember This is What Can Happen To You, when Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior said about Azerbaijan that publicizing the news of the crackdown on Internet bloggers would chill the use of the Internet? Make people not want to go online or be very careful about their activities online? Remember how I was browbeaten to death for daring to suggest there was an Internet surge in Uzbekistan? But I countered this and said it was an Internet campaign that got the "donkey bloggers" released and I countered their theories of the efficacy of "networked authoritiarianism" (Rebeccah McKinnon's term) here and here (Is There an Arab Spring Bounce in Azerbaijan?) and then here for Central Asia. That is, I don't have ANY illusions that any Twitter revos are coming soon to these countries to utterly turn them over from head to foot, but I do ask: Why Can't We Say Azerbaijani Protest is Influenced by the Arab Spring and Social Media? Of course you can, and you don't need me to say this, you now have the released Emin Milli on the conference circuit to say it.
So last week, we were told at the OSCE Internet 2013 conference by Milli, the former political prisoner and blogger who just served 15 days in jail for his chronicling of demonstrations over the death of a soldier in the army, that there are one million sign-ups on Facebook. That's a lot of people for this small country. Socialbakers, the industry source on Facebook sign-ups, says there are more than a million now.
Says Socialbakers:
Our social networking statistics show that Facebook penetration in Azerbaijan
is 12.20% compared to the
country's population and 23.97% in relation
to number of Internet users. The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan
is reaching 1013080 and grew by more than
147280 in the last 6 months
Internet penetration was reported as 44% in 2010 by the ITU; then it was reported last year as 68% and is growing. So it's a lot, and people who say that Azeris are scared off the Internet by oppression were wrong, but people who say that such large percentages of Internet penetration will lead to revolution are also wrong, as the authorities are still very skillful in picking out people to coopt, intimidate or jail and torture as needed to keep the peace -- especially for those Western oil and gas companies coming in to develop the Shah Deniz II fields.
The number of people on the square in Azerbaijan isn't one million and isn't 28,000 but more like 2,000 or 200 sometimes, depending on the topic.
Now, Central Asia is much, much more "backward" or behind when it comes to the Internet, let alone Facebook, and has not had the kind of "Youtube protests" about local official corruption that then leads to street demonstrations -- although the phenomenon still can be found here and there even in these countries.
So you have to be ready, as these things can jump the synapse -- significant unrest/revolution/unheavals in Azerbaijan would obviously affect other neighbouring countries and so on.
Even so, we're been getting for years now articles that tell us not to worry, everything is boringly stable in Central Asia, and implying that anyone who crafts any other scenario is just hopelessly mired in Twitter mania and Jeff Jarvis-style over-romanticization of social media's power (that would not be me) or just not "getting it" about the Arab Spring, which didn't turn out to be "all that" in the end as we well know (and this article, Aftermath of a Revolution, in the International Herald Tribune really sums it up well).
This article was kind of written already on Kendzior's political home base, Registan.net, by Myles Smith: Central Asia: What Not to Look For, datelined January 2013.
Kendzior doesn't link to her colleague but should have, as he put down the markers for the prediction businesss, and I couldn't disagree, although as I said, you really need to have better theories of change and a more hopeful expectation about the people in these countries and their need to have a better life than they do under their current dictatorships.
I could answer Kendzior in detail but then, I already have in the past, and did on another article exactly a year ago by another specialist, Scott, Radnitz, Waiting for Spring, who told us "not to hold our breaths" and compare Central Asia to the Arab Spring -- and it's a good thing we didn't, as we'd be as blue as a UN peacekeeper's helmet now.
Even so, I'll just cut and paste below the fold what I put in the comments to Radnitz's peace again, because it still applies. And keep in mind that what the Arab Spring had was Al Jazeera (not WikiLeaks or Anonymous, silly, that's just self-serving hacker twaddle). Central Asia doesn't have that; it has Russian TV. So, you get what you get, even if you add Facebook.
The other day a colleague sent me a link to a social graph that he said was "fascinating" -- it was about the protests in Azerbaijan.
It turned out to be made by anthropologist Katy Pearce but I couldn't see her name in my view of the screen -- it was only visible later when I returned for a closer look and scrolled down -- but of course, visible to anyone who clicked on the link and took an interest.
Here's what it said (go to the link and keep reading for the full jargon-laden experience):
The graph represents a network of up to 1500 Twitter users whose recent
tweets contained "#protestbaku". The network was obtained on Monday, 14
January 2013 at 23:01 UTC. There is an edge for each follows
relationship. There is an edge for each "replies-to" relationship in a
tweet. There is an edge for each "mentions" relationship in a tweet.
There is a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a "replies-to" or
"mentions". The tweets were made over the 2-day, 6-hour, 37-minute
period from Saturday, 12 January 2013 at 15:36 UTC to Monday, 14 January
2013 at 22:13 UTC.
What, you didn't get the wind-chill factor or the latitude and longitude on Google maps? This report is the sort of high-falutin essential nonsense that passes for scholarship in our day, and I'm going to be ruthless with it. I've decided to call this field of study "machinopology" instead of "anthropology" because I think that not only have these social scientists ceased to study real human beings; when they study their spoor left on the Internet -- not a good substitute -- they become fierce apologists for this decidedly inaccurate and misleading means of studying people and you can't speak sense to them.
THE "SCIENCE" OF HASHTAG DIKTAT
In gathering this data, Pearce was heedless about what has been called the Niels Bohr effect -- that the scientist himself intrudes on his data by the very act of study and is studying his study, so to speak. Pearce first goosed her contacts on Twitter to come up with a hashtag, then pushed them toward used of a standardized one, #protestbaku -- policing with fierce hostility anyone who didn't keep to the meaning of the hashtag as she saw it (typical of the Twitter hashtag Nazis). There may have been very rich and rewarding conversations on Twitter on January 14; but if they didn't have Katy Pearce's hashtag, they are like a tree falling in the proverbial forrest...
In fact, Pearce was such a "scientist," that she even got into an epic Twit fight and started to mouth off to some of the people who appeared to be "pro-government" tweeters -- who maybe just didn't seem to agree with Katy and her source-friends. She even yells at this woman to "stay off their hashtag" -- not just because she cared about the integrity of meaning, but because it would have screwed up her results if the meaning wasn't uniform. (If you don't understand the meaning of hashtags, email me, I've been on Twitter since 2007).
Imagine, pretending you are an impartial anthropologist, and telling anybody in the field -- even a regime tool (which we can't be sure this person really is, simply because they disagree with the way the soldier's death should have been handled) -- to "go home, turn off your phone/computer, watch a movie, and leave these people alone". Does she think she's talking to her toddler here?! This is just outrageous stuff -- but it passes as "cool" because it's machinopology and not anthropology -- and anything goes.
BACK STORY
Anyway, I use Twitter as a kind of "Delicious" if "Delicio.us" had ever been functional and useful. That is, I park links for myself there to catch up on later and figure I can also share them at the same time if anyone else has anything to say about them. I often go back to my own stream to find things -- for me, re-tweet often does mean endorsement and I don't shirk from that association, but it also can merely mean "parked here to read later, looks interesting" or "read this, want to file it". I wrote on my tweet about the social graph an "h/t" to this colleague because that's what you do when someone else tells you something you didn't know -- you acknowledge their reference. No big deal -- but then I saw a rare response from Katy Pearce, the anthropologist who feels she owns this field of Internet studies in the Caucasus.
Her remark was puzzling to me because she said "thank you" -- although I'm an enemy to her (she denounced me a year ago to my then-boss!) and then said she helped with a blog post. Not realizing what she was going on about, I called he out for her unsavoury role in joining up with Sarah Kendzior after I challenged the Registan diktat last year, and going to denounce me as somehow "unfit" to my editor at EurasiaNet because I...dared to stand up to Joshua Foust in a completely legitimate and much-needed manner, and because I refused to be bullied by these gals online.
I was particularly appalled at Pearce at the time -- I published a perfectly ordinary and fine little blurb about the surge of Facebook membership in Uzbekistan, citing Socialbakers; I cautioned that it had to be seen in relative terms due to the harassment there, but she blasted me as using shoddy research. It was insane -- over a blog blurb, and on Twitter. She herself later was found using Socialbakers, which is perfectly fine. She was doing this just to troll, as they say -- it was sinister.
So ever since stumbling on these academics and defense contractors on Registan, I've challenged them as a group that is a funny amalgam of seeming criticism of the US yet reverence for US policies such as on drones, and seeming criticism of the regimes of Central Asia -- but always within limits and always with disparaging the opposition, particularly in exile, and the human rights movements along the way.
It turned out Pearce was kvetching at me because she believed that "h/t"
should go not to the person who tipped me off to the link, but to her,
as designer of this graph. I simply didn't know it was made by her at
first, and no "impropriety" was intended; that she had to cross the
Internet to police this and make a snide comment lets you know how
HUGELY controlling she is -- so much so that those who once criticized
her or Kendzior publicly are now beaten into silence -- it's a scary
thing to watch. Academe is a frightful place. In a world where
attribution is one click away when you link, it's hard to posit ill will
or damage.
REALISM UBER ALLES
Thus, while I'm not in academia myself and not an Internet or official regional expert, I've had a long period of closely reading what Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior produce for the academic world, and have grown to be a very stringent critic as you can see in past entries of this blog under the topic "Registan": their thesis is designed to minimize and disparage dissenters; celebrate those who are more cerebral and incremental and less active; caution against publishing too much negative human rights material on the Internet so it doesn't scare off lolcat posters; and then essentially do the government's work for it -- making sure that the Internet is something that grows on the conditions and timetables and in the manner that these New Realist academics wish instead of people who use it for protest and not only communications. If you think this is a caricature of their studies, go and read them and judge for yourself. I think you will come away very disturbed if you care about democracy and human rights. They are part of the New Realists school of Joshua Foust, Nathan Hamm and others at Registan and they work overtime to belittle, discourage, disparage, intimidate and bully people in the human rights movement who disagree with their RealPolitik regarding the post-Soviet countries.
Time and again, in article or op-ed or longer monograph or journal piece, I've seen their theses "prove" the same points: a) the governments of Central Asia are all-powerful and will never change; b) no Arab Spring will ever occur here; c) there is no civil society here and only 2 1/2 old Soviet-style dissidents who have no following; d) people inform on each other and hate each other and are spiteful so it is not a milieu in which a social movement can get started; e) repression is very severe and even deadly.
It's not as if any of these things are untrue in a sense, but it's their culmination and their vectors that lead you to wonder what on earth they are up to here: they seem to see it as their job to discourage any challenge to these governments by using the homeopathic method -- only they get to challenge them -- a little, in the way they wish, but not too much.
That's actually why it's so strange Registan is having a conference this week to discuss the passing of Karimov -- it must be that they either feel this is a "safe" topic now or the defense contracting circles in which they travel find it useful to do a little scarifying of Karimov now. I've called Registan the "small game" before and that about sizes it up -- it's about some sort of power trip, but it's just not clear whose, entirely.
SHINY NEW COOL INTERNET THING -- WHICH WE HAD 12 YEARS AGO
The social graph that at first so fascinated me and others is a case in point for the kind of study of the post-Soviet countries that I simply find suspect -- suspect because it leads to conclusions and influences policy in such a way as to get those in power in our government or wealthy foundations or universities to stop taking the opposition seriously and to discount human rights work as marginal. Any objection to their New Realism is met with withering scorn that you are a Neo-Con and hopelessly mired with Commentary and Jennifer Rubin. There's no in-between for these people. ANY criticism gets the "Neo-Con" slur.
So...At first glance the social graph seems really cool! Who wouldn't like a cool Internet thing like this! As it happens, I first saw a social graph like this in The Sims Online in the year 2000, made by Will Wright. He had developed a program to capture in that simulated virtual world a way of showing relationships to people -- every time you gave a balloon to someone as an avatar, or even just interacted with them, that person would become your "friend"; if you slapped them, they would become your "enemy", and these "balloons" would then show as green or red in an elaborate graph accessible above every avatar's head on his profile. People spent hours pouring over these balloon graphs -- they were fascinating. You could acquire a "balloon" merely by going to a simulator or a place on the server and being in proximity to other people -- many a sim-hubbie would catch his sim-wifey cheating by reading her balloons. You could also see who wasn't letting their relationships "stay green" -- the more interactions you had with a person, the higher and brighter your relationship would show. The capturing of relationships by machine was something that fascinated Will Wright, maker of the Sims and now on the board of Linden Lab, maker of Second Life.
People don't take these virtual worlds seriously, thinking them as pathetic sexting chat rooms and furry enclaves, but I have followed them for their interesting sociology for more than a decade because I see them as petri dishes, simulators and testing grounds for the means and methods of social media and social networks on the wider Internet. Time and again, I have seen things prototyped, or played out in Second Life, that then appear in the real world, almost as if it had uncanny predictive powers -- events like WikiLeaks or the Instagram scandal -- all these have played out in these worlds first.
Another thing that Will Wright did was show -- because he could, possessing control of a virtual world in which every person's speech and actions could be captured by the machine -- what people were doing or saying. So he could take snapshots or make dynamic pictures -- X percent were kissing or X percent were going to the toilet as you can do in the Sims -- and X percent were saying the words "love".
So it's not surprising to me that now people use Twitter -- and all the gestures, as they are called ("likes", links, comments, replies, retweets, etc. etc. ) -- to track social relationship.
MACHINES ARE NOT PEOPLE
The problems is that machines are far from perfect in replicating organic human relationships -- replicating their ways and means online in social networks can be disastrous -- and the scientists studying this and pretending that it enhances anthropology don't seem to take into account the fundamental fallacies of their science, making it a pseudo-science.
I realize just how cool it is to have charts and graphs and fancy jargonistic words like edges and vertices. We have seen this in Second Life for years and it's old news for some of us. But it has to be thoroughly questioned, as it is laying now -- in its still-primitive state -- the grounds for the totalitarian Wired State, and it has to be challenged before our freedoms are eradicated. It's not just study; it's study with an aim to control society by letting certain elites drill and analyze the data and then use it to shape online experience -- where we all increasingly live. The most obvious exploitation of this data was in the recent elections, where sociologists were put to work for the Obama Truth Team to manipulate stories to attract voters.
THREE FALLACIES OF MACHINOPOLOGY
But there are deep fallacies in these machine-readings of people, and they need to be called out
Here are three main fallacies right off the bat in this artifact:
1. We can't be sure that retweets equal political affiliation. We are told ad nauseum especially by the Registani types on Twitter that "retweet ≠ endorsement" -- they love using the geeky ≠ which means "does not equal" but which isn't always instantly recognizeable as such to the average person. Of course, people usually lie when they say this, and are merely covering their asses, especially at jobs. Of course their retweets are endorsement. Especially when they retweet each other and bolster their friends. They're just saying that but we know better.
The assumption of Katy Pearce's graph here is indeed that retweet DOES mean endosement because she uses it to group people into political affiliation. She even says that pro-government forces are known for using certain words like "yolo". Of course, "yolo" is what the kids say on Tumblr or Facebook, "you only live once". It's very popular now among teens here in New York, especially Hispanic teens although it isn't a Hispanic word, it just sounds like one. There may be an insider's piece of esoteric knowledge here, where pro-government forces in Azerbaijan have already been established as always saying "yolo" like hipsters in New York, but I am out of the loop so I'll have to say that it needs questioning.
We can't be sure that every person who retweets dissenters' links or retweets government links are on the same page as those forces. Maybe they are only bookmarking. Maybe they are making a cover story but disagree. The fact is, you can't have it both ways. You can't, as academics CYAing on Twitter yourself and telling us "≠" on all retweets, yet in your shiny social graph studying a country's demonstration, suddenly then group everybody's tweets in a certain political framework as if retweets *do* equal endorsement. Which is it? Or at least admit that it's sometimes one, and sometimes the other, and you don't have a basis for grouping people rigidly in this fashion.
2. Many accounts, especially pro-government accounts, could be fake or bots. As one of the Azerbaijani tweeters noted, there are a lot of fake accounts made by the government. For all we know, there's a few guys sitting in the basement of the secret police and manufacturing all these personas. Or maybe some loyalists who spontaneously on their own do this, although the former scenario is more likely. There could be hundreds -- thousands of them -- and they could be set up by scripts or bots to behave even realistically.
The Anonymous types always grouse about the US military and its "persona" projects, which is used only overseas to do things like debate on Al Qaeda's web pages; they are not supposed to engage in propaganda at home, which is known as "blowback". But Anonymous itself wrote the book on persona craft, and do it themselves all over, everywhere, in spades, and were the first to cause destruction everywhere with it, corrupting the entire online environment. And the descendents of the Bolsheviks and the KGB, who were masters at making doubles and disguises, have no problem in moving this skill online. Again: they can sound very realistic but could be fake or even bots. The Flatter Bots in Second Life that go around appearing as suave men and women and flatter people's outfits and then eventually get them to give them money have had amazing success earning the bot wrangler tens of thousands of real dollars. Artificial intelligence and online persona work is really getting good. Turing would be proud.
3. Relationship lines may not mean anything. One of the first things we discovered with Will Wright's experiments 10-12 years ago, and then Philip Rosedale's experiments in Second Life in the last 5-7 years, is that when machines grab and aggregate and render relationship lines from chat and various other social gestures, they can be woefully inaccurate or outright wrong. I already mentioned the "balloons" in the Sims that caused couples to break up -- someone could teleport to a sim by accident, or due to a spam invitation; they would acquire a seeming "relationship" by appearing in proximity to someone, but it would mean nothing. In Second Life, when someone invented two-way wrist watches (hmmm) to show who was near you and beam that information up to a webpage for display, people howled and screamed because they felt it was an invasion of privacy.
It was. Unscrupulous and unethical hackers said it was open data so they could get to scrape it and use it. Technically it was, although no one who had chosen to make a public profile with their static data linked to their name and their list of favourite places or comments had ALSO granted permission for real-time display of their proximity data.
GIRLS NEAR ME DO NOT WANT TO BE NEAR YOU
It's like what happened then five years later -- just last year -- with Girls Near Me. That app was widely popular with boys -- they grabbed open FB data about girls with geolocation and used it to stalk them for dates. The girls did not like this because they hadn't put up FB pages to be accessed by creepy guys in bars with smart phones; maybe they didn't know how to fix their privacy sliders. This is a case where users screaming enough finally overwhelmed geekitude, and the ap was removed. People HATE HATE HATE having proximity data even if "open" displayed to the web; they HATE HATE HATE others -- scientists and marketers -- making judgements about it. Anthropologists are not supposed to do experiments or gather information on people without their consent. Did the people in the graph given their consent to be shown this way? Of course not.
But it's not only about privacy; it's about ridicularity. As one woman put it very aptly about the newfangled search thing that Facebook put up the other day: "Hey, is this thing going to make it so that FB stops offering my husband's ex-wife as a friend?"
Bingo. That's proximity data handled by machines in Machinopology which is a very poor substitute for anthropology -- which itself isn't always in ethical and skilled hands online or in real life these days.
I find that FB is uncanny in chosing just those people who are sworn enemies and serving them up to me over and over again as "friend" prospects; Linked-in is the absolute worst at this. It really is annoying and drives you away from the service. Of course "it can't know" and you wouldn't want "it" to know -- and it is supposed to "get smarter" by having you X out the offer. But you don'to want it to get THAT smart...do you?
MY FAVOURITE LINK TO HATE
So if I answer somebody's tweet; if I retweet them, if I even favourite them, it means nothing. One of the most common gestures I see online is when Anonymous "favourites" something critical I've said about them -- they don't mean that they like this; in fact, they hate it. They've favourited it merely to keep it parked and accessible so they can organize attacks on me among their contacts. I've seen this played out with others as well. Most things are not what they seem online; much of the time, they are just the opposite.
How many of those using #protestbaku were secret policemen; how many were hipsters; how many wanted to prove to Western grant-giving foundations that they were active? We may never know.
HOW SAFE ARE SOCIAL GRAPHS?
This brings me to the issue of privacy and the usage of these graphs. This first thing I noticed when I clicked on this thing -- after the initial "ooh, ahh, shiny" that anyone will make at seeing all the protesters of Azerbaijan laid out in a nice "map" -- was that the people in this nexus might not like being shown this way. Somebody casually firing off a tweet on their iPhone may not realize that a social scientist has now captured them and fixed them like a fly in amber as talking to a notorious opposition leader; now through a sinewy wire on a jpeg that is easily copied, they are forever not alone.
And that must be why you can't see this picture clearly. No matter how much you click or resize, the names actually don't show up. Only Katy Pearce and her fellow "scientists' can see this information.
This could be a function of my browser (Firefox); of the need to register for the site (I didn't) or some other artifact, but the fact is: I cannot click on it on various computers and on the iPhone and see anything, and others likely have that experience to.
So this Internet shiny dines out on being part of the "open" Internet and "accessible" and "free" but...you actually can't see it. If you *could* see it, you might start reality-testing it. You'd click on some of the big nodes -- people with larger and familiar pictures -- and see if those people linking in were really friends or enemies; casual or dedicated -- you might judge it.
But you can't do that: it is not clickable to a bigger size to really study. And I'm actually fine with that, given that this is Azerbaijan we're talking about -- that thing is an indictment! But there's something slimy about sending it all over the web to be gawked at, but not really seen. It's elitist and controlling. I think it's wrong. You could start from the premise that anyone with an open Twitter account in a sense "consents" to being seen and having their data known. But as we saw with Second Life and Girls Near Me, what people HATE HATE HATE is when their *proximity data* is shown. And that's what this does -- more than standing next to someone at a demonstration, it shows who was connected enough to share an idea, a link, etc. And that is risky. I think this has to be debated; it isn't being debated. Machinopologists -- the term I think is apt for people who have replaced the study of humans directly with the study of machine-gathered data about humans *and* are fierce apologists for this method -- think everything is up for grabs; they are greedy.
DISPARAGING THE DIASPORA
I also want to say something about the groupings. Katy Pearce, like Ethan Zuckerman before her, and others of like mind, seems to disparage the diaspora. This group is least interesting to her and if it is larger she discounts it. These are people not in the country, and almost then "disqualified" from study. There's a loathing of the diaspora among the New Realists because they tend not to be very realistic about their homelands; they are "in the way" of making that OstPolitik that the NRs want to achieve.
But I think this is hugely shortsighted. The diaspora is the living link to the closed society; it is the best thing we've got. Social media, the study of the social graph and the social gestures online are no substitute for these living human beings. Lots of people come and go from the diaspora, or receive family and friends as visitors who come and go. It's a rich milieu and it should never be discounted. If a few very vocal opposition leaders in exile seem to set the tone, well, look past that; there is a lot more there. Twitter, Facebook, Live Journal -- these are the living ways these connections are kept up these days, and the diaspora handling of them is vital -- it simply shouldn't be disparaged as somehow irrelevant or "not a Twitter revolution". The diaspora is what helps bring awareness to Western countries as well (and the rest of the world, for that matter, but the West cares the most).
LIKE BIRDS NOT ON A WIRE
So that leaves the core of the people actually in the country, using Twitter for logistics, and tweeting with a geolocation of Baku itself (and as we know from the time when everyone switched their Twitter to say they were in Iran to try to confuse the secret police, this could be misleading as well).
One of my most vivid memories in monitoring human rights in Eurasia in the last 35 years is a scene I saw in Baku in the early 2000s -- perhaps 10 years ago or so. There was a large street demonstration organized by opposition parties and groups. It was all men -- women were seldom seen on the street. They all had cell phones and used them to coordinate their movements and get information about police movements and arrests and the route of their march.
Suddenly, the government shut off all the cell phones -- they can do that in a country where the mobile companies are under their control. Everyone on the square suddenly got disconnected. None of them could talk to each other and they were all confused and worried now, and couldn't figure out what was going on. That's how the government wanted them. It was like a flock of birds, suddenly flying into some poisonous air or something. They all stopped or jerked around and began meandering off in odd directions.
I've seen the authorities do the same thing in Minsk.
So the social graph is fragile; it is risky to establish it, but it isn't *so* fragile and *so* risky that people don't make it and use it.
And of course opinions change, groups form and reform, affiliations break and rejoin -- and these kinds of graphs are ephemera and really of limited value. There is no substitute for talking to people live in real life.
WHY CAN'T YOU JUST INTERVIEW PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE?
One of the critiques I had of another study done by Pearce and Kendzior is that they outsourced their field world. That is, while no doubt they've done interviews in the field, and talk to people online or when they visit the US, and while they do go to these countries occasionally, they tend to write articles and studies without going there for significant periods of time. And they literally outsourced their questions on one survey about the Internet and attitudes towards risk and critical information to some USAID type entity that was making a survey *anyway* already in country, and simply tucked in a few questions on the subject of Pearce and Kendzior's study into their own large and baggy effort.
I found the redaction of the questions odd; I found the whole thing just unsound. Why can't you go there and do your own surveys, even with less samples? Maybe it's too hard to get a visa and function in the country? Well, then let's not pretend we're studying a closed society just because we have a newfangled "open Internet". The two don't necessarily mesh.
There's more that could be said about the personalities involved in Azerbaijan; about the issue itself; about the things that motivate people to demonstrate. There was a strange locution that Katy Pearce was happy to pick up and rebroadcast: "this isn't a political demonstration". Nonsense. of course it's political. Every demonstration is political. And there's nothing wrong with being political and demonstrating. It's as if the hipsters of Baku want to be post-political as some strategy to save their skin. This won't work. And it denegrates others who are demonstrably political. Again, it's okay to be political; just because a demonstration wasn't on the platform of a political party or with political party leaders speaking or whatever the criteria was, doesn't mean it isn't highly political -- which AGAIN is ok to be! You sense that for Pearce, it's wrong to be political because that means challenging the government in unrealistic ways....That won't do if you are a New Realist.
All of a sudden, we have some new opportunistic Friends of Belarus -- Cory Doctorow and Rebecca MacKinnon. They had virtually nothing to say all this time since December 2010 -- 18 months -- while hundreds of people have been tortured and put in jail, including the main independent journalists and those operating independent web sites like charter97.org That's because Belarus just doesn't "fit" in their worldview, dominated by the US and its allies and the US and its sins. Russia's sins and the sins of all its allies are outside the ambit of their "progressive" worldview; they virtually never talk about it (both of them piped up about Russia only when they could bang on Microsoft, when corrupt Russians using Microsoft's name harassed human rights activists and environmentalists).
Now that Swedish investigative journalists and NGOs have produced a film exposing the awful role played by Teliasonera in helping the regimes of Belarus, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and other post-Soviet states, finally Cory Doctorow can pay attention: evil telecom! Must stop! Boo, hiss!
We missed you and EFF back back in December 2010 when the Belarusian regime cracked down on thousands of peaceful demonstrators who were protesting election fraud, arresting some 700 people, and sentencing hundreds of them to lengthy sentences of years. Andrei Sannikov, Uladzimer Nyaklyaeu and the other opposition presidential candidates and their staffs. We missed you throughout 2011 and 2012 as all these people were mistreated and tortured, new arrests took place, and few but the US and EU governments and a few NGOs said anything about it. Throughout this period the regime closed down websites or hijacked them to show viewers only state sites; the main news site charter97.org has constantly been under DDOS attacks. This was never of interest to you Internet freedom fighters.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and various Swedish non-governmental organizations protested repeatedly to try to get them released, and finally the combination of US and EU sanctions on this regime led to the release of some leaders, although some still remain. EFF and all the cool kids could have cared less about Internet freedom issues in Belarus and these other countries as they didn't fit your paradigm of "Blame America First".
You only tuned in when you could see the words "telecom" and begin to salivate in glee -- because you don't care about human rights in countries like Belarus or Uzbekistan for their own sakes until you can find some angle that fits your own "progressive" ideology of hating on telecoms as evil obstacles to your Google-centric world.
Teliasonera has enabled bad regimes, to be sure. But telecoms or Western businesses aren't the central issue, and if you take away their support, these autocrats just turn to China and their telecom companies. In fact evil telcos, whether Western, Russian, Chinese, or whatever, are making millions of people able to have their own cell phones and use the Internet, which some of them use to gather information independently and protest the regimes.
And then, confronted with this complex story in which a Swedish telecom has not done the right thing, but the real problem is the nature of these authoritarian regimes, all you can do is turn an infantile gaze at your pet issue of surveillance in the United States, where you have more freedom of expression than any country in the world
As for Rebecca MacKinnon, I welcome her to the Newly-Acquired Conscience Society for Belarus on Twitter, and she bristled. "Do your homework before accusing me," in an angry tweet. I had commented that she had not seemed to notice what Teliasonera or other companies did, although she's always banging on telecoms. She retorted that in fact she had tweeted about it a few days ago. Oh, but that doesn't count, as the time to care about telecoms and Belarus was 18 months ago, not a few days ago, if you really cared -- and in fact, it was never really the primary issue. She also said she had mentioned the issue in her speech at Oslo Freedom Forum (I don't exactly see it there, but whatever*).
Yet that speech epitomizes what is so awful about MacKinnon, Doctorow, Jillian York and the rest of the EFF and Berkman Center gang -- the insidious moral equivalency of democratic countries under the rule of law with authoritarian countries without the rule of law. "Even in democratic nations," MacKinnon piously intones, "governments are using excuses to increase this control, such as the need for the protection of children." Excuses? Why can't governments block child pornography, which in fact involves often the exploitation of Russian children?!
"We’re finding a growing global movement against companies who we feel are infringing our rights," she gushes. Of course, you don't have rights regarding companies -- something I've been protesting about for seven years long before EFF cared about the typical Silicon Valley corporate TOS.
Companies are non-state actors and are not obliged to enable your piracy, child pornography, or terrorism, let alone even absolutist free speech. They are private entities with their own rights of freedom of association and freedom of expression. Sure, we would like them to be bound at least by their own TOS (they seldom are) or principles of justice and rights, but negotiating such "rights" through the ITU or UN would bring about the very horrible controls from authoritarian regimes that MacKinnon also references in her protest that "we don't have a seat at the table" at ITU. (And that's why I say the answer is not to impose new "guidelines" or negotiate international rights in hostile international territory, but simply to enable a free market of ISPs and social media platforms with a range of approximation to these rights and values. MacKinnon doesn't like Apple's "censorship" of the intifada app? Then let her go over to CREDO or some other "progressive" telecom that can provider her with such violent entertainment.)
Let me point out that none of us have a seat at the table at ITU even if MacKinnon's organizations get seats -- and that's not the way to get Internet freedom. Companies get to decide their course. The last place we should look for promotion of real freedom of expression and the fundamental liberty of Internet connection is the Global Network Initiative of Internet-related companies and NGOs over which MacKinnon presides -- they could care less about Egypt or Syria or Belarus or Azerbaijan in the GNI context, whatever they do on their own, but devote most of their ire against US congress people drafting bills against piracy or promoting cybersecurity -- Google's business imperatives matter far more to them than basic human rights for all.
MacKinnon uses her highly-visible pulpit at the Oslo Freedom Forum to talk about a piece of legislation that she doesn't like that hinders violation of intellectual property rights. "EU politicians are increasingly saying that policies like ACTA are dead," she gloats. What about the journalists who are dead in places like Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Uzbeksitan, Rebecca? That's not the fault of telecoms or evil Western governments who want to prosecute pirates: it's the fault of those very authoritarian regimes.
MacKinnon is thrilled that Wikipedia thugglishly went dark to whine about anti-piracy legislation that offended their "copyleftist" goals; that charter97.org was dark for many days due to the KGB never bothered her. For MacKinnon, protesting against firewalls put into place by the authoritarian and brutal state of Pakistan, where journalists are murdered with impunity, is all on a smooth and glib moral plane with the US, maybe passing some laws that in fact were narrowly defined against specific kinds of commercial piracy -- bills that were defeated by a flash mob organized by Google, and Mitch Kapor's anti-copyright organizations EFF, PCF and Fight for the Fututre.
It's really freaky -- the only way that MacKinnon and these other self-absorbed and self-referential North Americans can see their way clear to taking up issues of human rights abroad is if they can find an evil Western corporation in the mix, or a Western government opposing piracy. The roots of piracy in authoritarian countries like Russia that metasticize their corruption to the rest of the world are uninteresting to them.
I remember back in December 2010 and January 2011 there were various protest groups on Facebook where some of us repeatedly raised the issues of the European telecoms. There is an Austrian company doing business in Belarus that was involved as well as the Swedish company. An influential "progressive" Austrian activist actually didn't want to take up boycotts of companies or an EU boycott of Belarus, because "this would harm people". Nobody did.
At that time, the Skype conversations of all the opposition leaders were being published in the state newspaper, sometimes in tendentious and false excerpts. It seems some mobile phone conversations were also used, and the location data -- people were placed in the square at the time of the demonstration using this information, and that was enough to jail them.
Of course, Lukashenka has been in business since 1996, long before the Internet and mobile phones were so present even in his own repressive country, and would find ways to jail people even without any evil foreign telecoms, as he always had, using the prodigious capacity of the still-named KGB, which follows people everywhere the old fashioned way. I recall once going to meet an opposition candidate along with some Belarusian journalists, and there were so many cars following us there was a traffic jam.
There were different theories about how the Skype calls got in the state press -- the KGB didn't necessarily hack into Skype; they may have simply hacked into computers and read logs, or they may have simply opened up computers with Firefox, which handily open up all applications for you with their embedded pass words -- awfully convenient for the secret police unless you thought to use various devices to erase or download your hard drive quickly on to a flash drive.
But people didn't think they were going to be arrested. They had been allowed to campaign independently during the election and have meetings with independent candidates. They thought a peaceful election-night rally on a square wouldn't lead to such a severe crackdown.
Regardless of how the secret police got the conversations, location data, etc., by their own sleuthing or with the mechanical affordances of the telecoms they had access to, or which colluded them, the centrality of evil is in their corner, not foreign companies. I've said this about China and Cisco as well.
I was just reading about Sergey Brin's anguish in staying in China after the Chinese government censored; he justified remaining under his usual theory that more knowledge was better than less, and that the Chinese people would get more from even a censored Google than if it were completely removed. It took the Chinese government's direct assault on Google's own servers for him to see it more personally -- and then he could see his way clear to exiting Google -- when a company has skin in the game, it's not until their own skin burns that the game becomes less fun for them, as they keep rationalizing it as still fun for other people.
___________
*When I debated MacKinnon about this and she mentioned the Oslo Freedom Forum, a pretentious little social media flak from OFF began following me. I asked him if he stalked people when they disagreed with OFF speakers. "Don't flatter yourself," he told me rudely -- as I often noticed, "strategic communications" is a profession where above all, you are entitled to be an arrogant ass and amplify it across all platforms. I then asked if he had an automatic script that followed anyone who mentioned OFF.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has word of a workshop going awry in Geneva that was supposed to be about media freedom in Azerbaijan:
We are deeply concerned by the defiant attitude shown by Azerbaijani government representative Ali Hasanov, also an adviser to President Ilham Aliyev, at the workshop, which invalidates his stated willingness to have a constructive dialogue with critics. We are also disappointed at the failure of the EBU to publicly criticize or in any way challenge Azerbaijani authorities on their press freedom, human rights, and freedom of expression record--this has left an impression of wilful blindness toward the government's repressive policies.
A joint letter of all the Western participants can be seen here with all the complaints of bad faith on the part of Ali Hasanov, the head of the Department for Public and Political Issues at the Administration of the President of Azerbaijan— "specifically calling independent local advocacy and media-monitoring organizational representatives “inaccurate,” “non-objective,” and “oppositionist."
Well, they may be -- they are -- but that's not the point, they still need to be free and not persecuted.
The European Broadcasting Union organized this particular "constructive" dialogue -- not exactly a pillar of strength one would go to for press freedom defense, but then likely they see that as the job of something like CPJ.
I was talking today to a colleague who must have worked in 20 different conflict zones in the last 20 years, and the sense of futility human rights work can have, unless you go really small-bore and focus on little improvements or single cases.
These sorts of workshops -- my God, I've been going to them for 30 years myself, and how pointless.
We all pretend that these officials are going to act in good faith and be worthy interlocutors.
They aren't.
We all go through the motions of cranking up our indignation at their outrageousness, when they call our colleagues "hacks" worthy of jailing if they don't get the story right -- although our crank surely is getting cranky.
All of this stuff, really, is it worth it?
Well, it's good that ever-new generations of paid employees of international organizations do come forward and walk through their positions on the kabuki theater stage of outrage.
Honestly, Aliyev, when you have the whole world's attention on EuroVision because you're holding it in your capital? you're supposed to behave and at least temporarily let there be more press freedom, not crack down and behave badly.
Or hey -- or not. Because you can.
The letter complains about the fact that the government sent only officials or GONGOs and not real independents. Isn't the time to complain about that before the meeting, as a condition of its very existence? Azerbaijan needs the EBU and the fig leaf that such international meetings give way more than the EBU needs Baku.
And say, indignation about this problem seems awfully, late, too:
The failure of the EBU to publicly criticize or in any way challenge the Azerbaijani authorities on their press freedom, human rights, and freedom of expression record left an impression of wilful blindness toward the government’s repressive policies and raises questions about the EBU’s commitment to defending these values.
Wouldn't it be better not to even take part in the EBU's fandango, rather than allow it to lend legitimacy to the illegitimate? This is always the wrangle -- and I think we'd all be better off with a more clean position, saying that unless the EBU secures X Y or Z conditions for a meeting, and makes robust criticisms of the harassment of colleagues, it's off.
The government only revealed itself to be preoccupied with the same fake issues of the Soviet era, pretending that it's all about ethics or utility. We are not making progress here.
Then to add insult to injury, while an independent Azeri was supposed to be allowed to speak at the press conference, he was pushed aside by the Azerbaijani government and EBU cadres. Figures!
While I appreciate all the jazz about "concrete reform steps" at the end, the real take-home here for me is this: don't waltz around any more with the EBU or the Azerbaijani government. They have failed to show good faith and any further waltzing with them only gives them legitimacy and you lack of credibility.
Here's it's taken a poor, blind provincial Chinese human rights activist named Chen Guangcheng, taking tremendous risks, to escape from house arrest and leave his family behind, and come to the US Embassy seeking refuge, to throw into stark relief the awful human rights situation in China. It's a situation we always seem to relegate to quiet diplomacy
Hillary Clinton was hoping to get through her talks there without any hub-bub and that usual delicate quiet diplomacy, and now this.
The harrowing account of Chen's escape, his pick-up by the Embassy diplomats who decided to give him temporary refuge, and his leaving on terms that aren't clear into a situation that worsened are all detailed in the Times.
What's really going on? Why couldn't Chen stay in the Embassy? He says officials "weren't proactive enough" and essentially asked him to leave, according to the Times. Why couldn't a US official stay with him until he's had adequate time to articulate his wishes and leave the country with his family if that is what he wishes?
There's a lot of confusion, but having been involved myself in these high-stress highly visible summit dramas between superpowers, such as with the exchange in the Soviet era of political prisoner Yuri Orlov and journalist Nick Daniloff for Soviet spies (I worked as a translator for Orlov), these things are never easy. There are always difficulties and last-minute hitches and people changing their minds about things.
I don't know if the memory of the five years with the Soviet Pentacostals in the basement of the US Embassy was still fresh in anybody's mind (it would be in the mind of Wayne Merry, the diplomat who had to live through it in Moscow!). But it's tremendously difficult. Obviously, Embassy staff want to avoid a situation where they are seen to create a magnet for asylum-seekers. In the Soviet era, there were droves of them usually arrested before they even got near the door, who were filling up the labour camps (we met them in Perm 36).
On the other hand, they can't in good conscience feed people to the wolves and if someone like Chen has made it this far, you have to stay the course. And the nature of Chen's state of mind, and his possible reversals, and his possible misunderstandings aren't the issue: he's a man by whom the US must do right.
The US has to obtain more than diplomatic assurances here; they have to have the right to accompany Chen or perhaps, failing gaining agreement for that, try to deploy an NGO volunteer as a witness to accompany him and report back to the Embassy. They must try to get them all out of the country.
I feel as if Obama's foreign policy -- such as it is -- is really falling apart now in the last part of his term. It was never sterling, and caused my growing lack of support for him.
But it's almost as if he and his people said to themselves, "Let's make a series of quick wins or QIPs (quick-impact projects or whatever they call them) across the global chessboard on a variety of problem countries, and see if we can get them to stay put until I'm re-elected."
And it's that craven, utilitarian attitude toward foreign policy as merely an instrument of domestic power that is messing it up. Sure, all politicians play foreign issues for domestic audiences. Yet to turn foreign policy purely into a campaigning platform never seems to have been done so egregiously.
First, there was the stumble with the live mike with Medvedev. "I need space" -- no standing up to the Russians -- no offset when the reset hasn't worked -- and the humiliation of having that taken up by Romney who rightly said that Russia is our major enemy *because Russia has made us its enemy* and doesn't help on a whole host of problems from Syria to Afghanistan to Iran.
Next, there was the scandal where Obama Administration officials leaked a story that may not have been true, or was only partly true, that Israel was making some deal with Azerbaijan for refueling rights in some ostensible plan related to the bombing of Iran. Than Baku could hardly make anything that stark without retaliation against the Azeri minority in Iran and a host of other problems in the region didn't seem to matter. The main thing was to send a message to both Israel and Azerbaijan not to do anything funny on Iran until Obama got re-elected.
Then there was the trip to South Korea, to stand tall on North Korea and settle things there -- which backfired and led to the North Koreans firing a (failed) missile. Not good.
Then on to Latin America, where we really looked like imperialist sexist pigs with the president's own security detail taking advantage of the local women. Everybody looks bad here, and it isn't helped by Obama joking at the White House correspondents' dinner that he had to leave soon and get the Secret Service home on their new curfew.
Then this eerie trip in the middle of the night to Afghanistan to give a press conference in a heavily guarded army compound, with little said about how the country is going to really fare or what we're going to do for it after troops are pulled out -- and then with a suicide bombing right after the presidential plane leaves.
And now this Chinese mess.
I have to wonder if there was an adequate translator here -- it sounds as if there wasn't if they can't seem to tell the difference between him saying "kiss Hillary" or "see Hillary".
When I first saw EurasiaNet dutifully re-post a story from Foreign Policy, "Israel's 'Secret Staging Ground' alleging that Israel had a deal with Azerbaijan to refuel at Azerbaijan's airbases on the border with Iran, I wasn't surprised. (Baku later denied this, but EurasiaNet didn't note that yet).
That is, I wasn't surprised that Joshua Kucera of EurasiaNet was reprinting Foreign Policy -- there's a close relationship between EurasiaNet authors and Foreign Policy, where they publish. Nor was I surprised that both Foreign Policy and EurasiaNet were running a story to intensify mistrust of Israel -- the EurasiaNet tilt, like Foreign Policy, is toward the "progressive" line that is quite critical about Israel.
The author of the FP story, Mark Perry, said:
"The Israelis have bought an airfield," a senior administration official told me in early February, "and the airfield is called Azerbaijan."
But -- as Kucera reminds us -- when Israel made a $1.6 billion arms agreement with Azerbaijan, "ikely Azerbaijan's largest single arms purchase ever," he said that it "wasn't because of Iran":
The timing of the deal is misleading: regardless of the ongoing ratcheting up of tension between Israel and Iran, and increasing attention to Israel's intelligence activities in Azerbaijan, these weapons are destined to be used not against Iran, but against Armenia, which controls the breakaway Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Though it's tempting to think otherwise.
So Kucera denies an Iran-related motivation -- but falls for the temptation to some extent himself:
Is Azerbaijan going to use Israeli weapons against Iran? No chance. Azerbaijan has nothing to gain by attacking Iran, or even by cooperating with an Israeli attack except in the most discreet possible way.
Except in the most discreet possible way, you see. As Kucera adds:
The exception would be if Azerbaijan's influence were so discreet as to allow Baku some plausible deniability; then Iran probably wouldn't stand to gain from attacking Azerbaijan. According to the FP report, the most likely use for the Azerbaijan airfields would be so that Israeli aircraft could land there after an attack, obviating the need for mid-air refueling en route to Iran, which Israel isn't particularly experienced with and which would reduce the amount of weapons the planes could take on each sortie.
I wondered if this was a clever new kind of plausible-deniability deterrence -- if true -- or a clever new way to claim you don't think Israel is going to do something bad -- and then claim in fact it secretly will.
What I was most puzzled about, however, regarding the FP piece and the subsequent piece in The Bug Pit was this: why didn't they mention the sizeable Azeri population within Iran?
There are at least 16 million Azeris in the south of Iran (there are no official numbers on this revealed but they are believed to make up 24 percent of the population); they travel frequently across the border to Azerbaijan, where it's like a vacation for them as Azerbaijan remains a secular state and doesn't have the same strict rules. Foreign Policy mentioned this minority, but only in terms of recently fraying relations (they are always fraying over one thing and another) -- the accusations that Azerbaijan was helping Israeli agents assassinate Iranian scientists. And later, only historically, in reference to the posibility raised by retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Oded Tira of enlisting the support of the Azeri minority as a hypothetical (unlikely, as they are loyal to the regime -- they have to be, to survive).
But they didn't mention the sizeable Azeri population within Iran as a powerful deterrent to Baku not really ever embarking on anything that provocative against Tehran.
Indeed, the Azeris of Iran are hostages to anything that Israel and Azerbaijan might do that Iran might not like. Tehran can and does retaliate against them every time there are escalation of tensions in Caspian Sea conflicts, for example -- we've seen this time and again with various scandals -- Azerbaijan makes a pipeline deal that Iran doesn't like, or moves towards positions that Iran doesn't like on Caspian controversies, and they threaten to retaliate.
Oh, but there *is* a "strong, but mostly quiet, alliance" between Baku and Tel Aviv says EurasiaNet because WikiLeaks tells us.
Millions of dollars of Israeli weapons have already been sold to Azerbaijan -- and remember the drone that crashed? That was said to be Israeli-made.
The FP report cites a "a senior retired American diplomat who spent his career in the region and "four US military intelligence officers". There is a lot of detail but it's mainly citing research on the hypotheticals.
After this report came out, I thought to myself: there's a dog not barking here -- Russia. Russia does a lot of the talking on the whole Iran nuclear issue, as an ally of Iran's, and has backslid on progress it once made ostensibly pressuring Iran -- especially as relations have worsened with the US and NATO over Libya.
Why didn't Moscow have anything to say about this supposed move to help Israel ratchet up its deterrent factor (which could also double as a provocation ratcheting up tensions, of course, like all deterrents in the nuclear game)?
Azerbaijan is Russia's ally and close partner on some things (energy) -- and Russia never really seems able to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by pressuring Azerbaijan, although as a nominally Christian-majority nation it is historically perceived as Armenia's ally as well. Periodically Russia seems to imply it won't help solve that conflict if it doesn't get its way on this or that gas or pipeline project. For that matter, Russia is now better friends than it used to be with Israel. Wouldn't it have something to say? It didn't...
Veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari has written in the Times of Israel claiming last week’s bombshell from Foreign Policy magazine about Azerbaijan’s willingness to allow Israel to use its air bases to strike Iran was pure fiction...But though Yaari presents some good arguments why it might not be true, unlike magazine author Mark Perry, he offers no sources or reporting to back up his assertion.
Commentary author Jonathan S. Tobin himself reported the story and found it plausible at the time (like FP and EurasiaNet, although Commentary is pro-Israel). He didn't mention the Azeri-hostage factor, either, but he probes in a different direction:
Unless you are willing to believe, as perhaps Yaari and others disputing its authenticity do, that Perry is lying about the fact that senior officials in the Obama administration leaked the story to him, it’s still important to ask why they did so. What possible motive could they have had?
While the story could be true, shining such a spotlight on it, reasons Tobin, reveals:
the willingness of Obama’s minions to circulate the tale speaks volumes about the off-the-record malevolence that lurks beneath the surface of the president’s current charm offensive aimed at Jewish voters.
I don't think you have to scratch too hard on that surface to see the malevolence, judging from the Battle of the Think Tanks recently in Washington, where Center for American Progress and AIPAC and others related on each side of the Israel-Palestine issues battled fiercely on Twitter and the blogosphere, in the end, each side sacrificing staff. You could also look at the 771 plus comments under Perry's article -- the antisemites and conspiracy loons are having a field day.
Tobin cites' Yaari's more practical military concern that FP didn't seem to factor in:
Iran’s friend Turkey is not likely to permit the Israeli Air Force to fly over its territory to get to the Azeri bases.
While he doesn't mention the 16 million Azeris as such, Yaari does mention yet another regional enclave factor -- Nakhchivan, the Azeri enclave borderd by Iran from which Azerbaijan is cut off by Armenian territory. As Yaari points out, it is useful to open up a map and look at this.
It's my belief that among the biggest factors restraining Baku from providing any huge support for Israel in terms of a possible pre-emptive strike are a) the Azeri minority held hostage b) Russia's disapproval. At the end of the day, Russia cares more about Iran than Israel, and so does Azerbaijan. It's next door. They're the ones that have to live with the Day After.
I'm taking for granted that the hostage factor is a huge restraint, but I'm willing to consider other alternatives based on the brutal pragmatism of this region's tyrants, and their sheer disregard for their own people, even in their own countries. But the belief that minorities can be held hostage and used as pawns is at least as old as Stalin's Prisonhouse of the Peoples, and part of the reason he chopped up the map with so many odd enclaves was to play people off against each other.
When Tajikistan arrested two Russian pilots and accused them of carrying contraband, as part of a larger dispute with Russia about payments for a base and the uneasy relationship with Russia's military presence on their soil, Russia instantly retaliated by saying they'd expel 10,000 Tajik labor migrants from Russia. That's how they roll. Of course, they have their own Russian hostage-population in Turkmenistan, and that has sometimes been a factor in their gas deals with Ashgabat, but lately, since the deterioration of relations after failure to get a price deal in 2009 and mutual acrimony over a pipeline explosion, the Kremlin hasn't done anything for the Russians trapped in Turkmenistan as Ashgabat doesn't recognize their dual citizenship and wants to force them to take new Turkmen passports.
Each one of these countries seem to have each others' titular nationality group, as they call it, in the form of a minority in their own country, and they play on it. But my point here is that you may not be able to count on them going to bat for their own when the chips fly.
Even so, I continue to think the deterrent factor is big on both fronts -- Baku is not going to deliberately harm their fellow Azeris lightly, or cause a huge influx of refugees they can't take care of -- they are still taking care of refugees from the past twenty years of crises. Nor will they fly in the face of what Russia wants.
Judging from a veritable flurry of smarmy Twittering, basically what these two very tight co-authors and girlfriends, associated with the notorious site Registan.net, have done is get their friends to hold a conference and invite their friends -- that's why I call it "networked academism" -- in a parody of their own paper's discussion of the dubious concept of "networked authoritarianism".
Oh, it's always done, and we see it everywhere -- academics in a certain school of thought or discipline or location develop networks of friends, and they all speak at each other's conferences and they all write blurbs for each other's books or cite each other. It's human nature, it's done everywhere, and we've all seen it in whatever field or endeavour we're in. As an old boss at Soros Foundations used to tell me, "I don't care if you pick your friends; just pick good friends!"
In the case of this conference, I suspect Dr. Paula Newberg, Director, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown, who is convening the meeting and speaking, just wanted to have a conference about a very hot and topical issue, and invited people she knew to speak and they suggested other people they knew, and that's how it goes. Far from sponsoring a thesis that concedes authoritarianism and implies we shouldn't fight it, she no doubt imagines she is sponsoring a discussion about how people overcome authoritarianism on the Internet. At her institute, they teach diplomats things like how to write blogs or discuss topics like "What is hype and reality in e-diplomacy?" so it's all good.
Another speaker, Dr. Séverine Arsène is the 2011-2012 Yahoo ! fellow in residence at Georgetown University; as Yahoo tells us, "Dr. Arsène’s project will explore how different notions of modernity across the globe are contextually based and how these varied representations shape the uses of social media, more specifically, as a tool for online protests."
I'll leave aside the Derrida and Foucault and Chomsky and Zizek on that bookshelf and simply note that I suspect this fellowship, part of Yahoo's Business and Human Rights Program, grew out of its considerable guilt trip for sending Chinese dissidents to the gulag. I don't know if the combination of Big IT corporate machinations around business and Big IT corporate guilt make for the best impetus and environment for serious academic study, but that question is just too big for my pay grade -- I suspect it's a question that if asked thoroughly, would take you to places that would undermine every single university in America. I'm not an academic.
The title of the conference is, "Having Your Say Online: The People's Voice in Authoritarian Contexts." I imagine my bristling at the uses of "The People" especially in a context where we're supposed to be talking about authoritarianism will date me to the Cold War, but I don't care -- there isn't any such thing as "the people," and even "civil society" and "the public" are institutions that can scarcely said to exist or are very fragile and fledgling in these societies anyway -- and that needs to be said. "The People" -- who are they, comrades? (Oh, and hey, I know at least one web site where the "People's Voice" is banned in the form of at least one people.)
Let's see: The conference is filled with zams -- Internews is sending a vice president; Katy Pearce is an adjunct professor of Communications, Culture and Technology at Georgetown University; Zeynep Tufekci is Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Courtney Radsch is Program Manager, Global Freedom of Expression Campaign, Freedom House, etc.
So it isn't a big-name slate and it is probably is as good as it gets when you organize conferences with your friends (and Pearce has just arrived at Georgetown. No matter -- these are all people with lots of "mindshare" through Twitter followers and blogs and forums; and zams, after all, do the staff work and really influence things even unbeknownst to the top bosses.
The viewpoints all range from about A to A and a half -- the differences between Kendzior and Pearce, with their doom-and-gloom news about authoritarian Azerbaijan, and Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with her over-enthusiasm about the power of networks in the Arab Spring and the revolutionary change of her own country, or Zeynep Tufekci, a booster of WikiLeaks (and celebrator of Twitter's news censorship-by-country program) are really negligible because they are all on the same managed-democracy circuit. They fawn over each other on blogs and Twitters excusing each other repeatedly for not really knowing each others' fields and therefore only willing to learn, blah blah. But they don't really differ about their central thesis: that the objective of social media is to put -- and keep -- a New Class of intellectual elites in power (including themselves!) who will decide what is effective or not effective in "global governance".
Our government, which has a much-discussed but not terribly well-funded (or speedily expended) Internet Freedom Program is supplying Katharine Kendrick, Foreign Affairs Officer, Internet Freedom, U.S. Department of State for the conference, and God help us, that may be as much grounded criticism of these extreme academics and activists as we'll be getting here.
CRITIQUE OF KENDZIOR/PEARCE PAPER 'NETWORKED AUTHORITARIANISM'
Kendzior and Pearce will discuss the theses of "Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan" in the latest issue of the Journal of Communication (I was finally able to get a copy). I've critiqued the summaries and discussions of it before as noted above, mainly here.
I've only been able to make one quick read through and I caution again that I'm not a social science academic. But I certainly have a right to critique it as much as anyone concerned about Internet freedom and how US public policy will be shaped on the Internet, so I will raise these concerns:
1. The paper is only 16 pages, of which 2 are taken up with footnotes and halves of others are taken up with charts -- it's slight. So slight as to be hardly construed as holding the weight of this awesome claim -- that reporting on abuses of authoritarian regimes using the boon of social media only retards the overall growth of social media (the hope for change) and therefore... we should stop that. Or something.
2. The paper is based on public opinion surveys made in 2009-2010 *before* the Arab Spring, which had a dramatic impact on the world, and this region, because of the many analogies (I reject Kendzior's thesis that discussing the Arab Spring's impact is "reverse orientalism" here.)
3. To be sure, the academics have studied social media content up to as late as 2011, but the surveys do not appear to be taken from that year. They also provide no indication of the social media they studied.
4. Although they make reference to the donkey bloggers' case as a premise upon which to hinge their arguments, and are studying the impact of the donkey bloggers' repression on Internet users during this period, the authors do not appear to have asked their informants in the survey about the "donkey bloggers" per se (at least, they don't say they do and don't make this explicit if they did).
Instead, in fact, they are using several questions that are part of a survey put on not directly by them, but by the Carnegie-funded Caucasus Research Resource Center as part of a larger survey that has been run annually since 2006. In it, they used a contrived "vignette" in which they mount two propositions and asked for five levels of agreement ranging from "disagree" to "neutral" to "very much agree."
As they write in the paper:
"Measuring support for protests was a significant challenge given Azerbaijanis' hesitance to criticize the government. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic as well as the political environment, this measure was presented as a vignette, a cameo description of a hypothetical situation ((King, Murray, Salomon, & Tandon, 2004; King & Wand, 2006) which allows for a specific interpretation of what the question is attempting to measure. Vignettes are less threatening because they are less personal (Hughes, 1998). The following three-step process was ultimately adopted as a result of pilot testing by the Caucasus Research Resource Center. First, respondents were given a privacy card in which they were asked to agree with one of two statements: (1) "People should participate in protest actions against the government, as this shows the government that the people are in charge" or (2) "People should not participate in protest actions against the government as it threatens stability in our country."
Obviously, these are accepted methods in the field, judging from their references, but the wording of the questions simply have to be challenged at the root: 1) the premise that "the people" can show the government that "they are in charge" is simply not one present in these societies. The people aren't in charge and haven't been in charge in centuries. They don't mount demonstrations with the presumption that they should be, or will be and 2) people can in fact perceive the authoritarian government as destablizing their own local situation with unfair actions such as shutting off electricity or forcing people to pick cotton, and may view protest as a means to restore stability.
More often than not, demonstrations in these countries are mounted on single issues like jobs or housing; in the recent case in Guba, it was about the governor's insult to people who opted to sell cheap land given to them by the government. The demonstrations are mounted on notions of justice -- often people expect that "the good tsar" who only has "bad advisors" will hear and see the victims' plight if only they can get past those "bad advisors" or "corrupt officials" and make a direct appeal. Justice has to do with making the system work as promised -- heavy punishment for miscreants, ridicule and banishment for corrupt officials -- not overturning the government or instituting alien concepts like separation of powers where some mythical "people" or civic entity will now take over and mount all kinds of supervisory organs over the all-powerful executive.
Thus, hearing any question put that way, many people would respond to the part of it that just doesn't tally with their experience or understanding and reject it -- the people aren't ever in charge and won't be. Stability is always advisable and that sounds like the right action. That could add significantly to the skewing of the outcome to a negative. And of course there's the tendency of Soviet audiences, well known from the University of Iowa studies done in the past, to pre-anticipate what the survey-taker wants and give it to him to be good subjects. The survey should factor that in with some kind of coefficient -- that doesn't seem to have been here and the problem is mentioned only in passing as a difficulty of the environment.
5. The concept of "networked authoritarianism" isn't an academic or scholarly concept, it's a journalistic slogan coined by a former CNN bureau chief in Hong Kong, Rebecca McKinnon, who has published a book about Internet freedom issues recently, but not a scholarly book.
(Oh, if it turns out "networked authoritarianism" really is a scholarly term accepted in the field, then shoot me as the networked authoritarian that you are, but I haven't heard this.)
My problem with McKinnon's use of this term -- and I've heard her speak on this and seen her numerous blog posts and articles on it -- is that it simply isn't true. Her premise is that the Soviet-type states are more sophisticated now, and use the Internet themselves now, and don't use crude methods of prior censorship or outright blockage -- instead they compete with a different narrative, or occasionally make object lessons of people in support of their authoritarianism.
Except, that's not how it is. In fact, these states don't even register certain newspapers, NGOs, parties, etc. which means at a very basic and crude level in the society there is outright censorship of the old-fashioned analog kind. In fact, they do block websites and jam mobile phones during demonstrations and engage in surreptious DDOS attacks on sites and all the rest of it in a very physical and very direct form of censorship. In fact the government is not open and the state media tightly controlled, in the most basic forms of censorship there have always been.
That they allow the Internet, the way they allow, oh, flush toilets and telephones and electricity, doesn't mean anything. It's just another layer. We never had a theory for "electricity authoritarianism" when Lenin declared that "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country". We never had "fax" or "email" authoritarianism. Why is social media special? Because it makes collectivism easier? But it was always easy.
Sure, these governments have sophisticated sock puppets and regime tools and an oprichina-like elite around themselves whose privileges depend on their cynical support of the regime and obnoxious harassment of dissidents. So what? They don't have to be networked to censor; or rather, they were always networked, as that's what collectivism, Soviet-style, is all about -- rigid networks suppressing individuals.
6. This brings me to my main complaint about the Kendzior/Pearce thesis -- that it is too harsh a predicter -- in its rigid descriptivism -- of the poor potential for, and inevitable failure of online dissent and democratization in these countries. Sure, the regime makes an object lesson of the donkey bloggers and the discussion of their persecution in fact leads people to reduce their usage (if in fact the survey really delivers that news -- I'm not so sure it does). But so what?
What Kendzior/Pearce don't have them is a theory -- or the rest of a theory -- to explain how the activism at home and abroad grew for the donkey bloggers, and the regime was eventually forced to release them. That reality -- that these imprisoned people were released! -- is something that just doesn't fit in their model so they don't analyze it. Instead, they prefer to describe how the internal and international protests failed throughout 2010, although finally the bloggers were released in 2011.
7. Imagine my surprise at discovering in this paper that Facebakers is referenced! Facebakers, renamed Socialbakers in December 2010, is a commercial agency that cooperates with Facebook and supplies information about how many people have joined Facebook and use it in a given country.
In fact, this was part of a drum-beat of harassment that they and Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm cooked up to try to silence my criticism of their theses on Registan after I was banned.
Pearce wrote that she couldn't accept my simple reporting of simple numbers until she could "see the methodology" and snarked that it was a commercial firm. Huh?! But she quoted it in her own paper here! The hypocrisy!
QUESTIONS TO ASK ON THE THEORY OF NETWORKED AUTHORITARIANISM
There's lots more to say about the paper and the troubling aspects of the theses, but let me cut to the kind of questions that I think need to be asked at this conference:
1. If the documenting and reporting of human rights violations in a country leads to less Internet usage because of fear of reprisals, are Kendzior and Pearce counseling people not to document human rights abuses and publish them online? Do they recommend that the State Department Internet Freedom Program not supply training or grants to those who maintain human rights web sites?
2. If documenting human rights abuse leads to a plunge in usage, or a plunge in political discussion, are Kendzior and Pearce recommending that democracy program directors and other foreign policy personnel steer their patrons toward more innocuous activity and safer content so that they can secure the increase of Internet penetration first and benign social networking activity first, and move to more critical stuff later?
Test case: all eyes will be on Azerbaijan with the coming EuroVision song contest. Should Internet users and bloggers use this as a chance to talk about the problems of human rights and social justice in their authoritarian, oil-rich state? Or should they stick to happy musical tweeting? (Guess what: no one will be able to stop them gabbing on social media and we'll hear a lot of hate of Armenians mixed with other interesting stuff.)
(This sort of cautious incrementalism of "what the traffic can bear," BTW, was the Internews recipe for TV broadcasting in 1990s and early 2000s, and frankly, it failed miserably as countries still shut down their clients in places like Azerbaijan anyway, even with their cautious programming, as the Internet VP might be prepared to admit.)
3. Whatever "chilling affect" the oppression of people like the donkey bloggers and other journalists killed or jailed in the last year may have had, in fact, the people of Guba show that both the Arab Spring model as well as the use of Youtube to get out their message worked dramatically to remove a disliked official and get people jailed for protest to be released. How does the "networked authoritarianism" model adapt to these kinds of phenomena, or in fact do they disprove the theory? In fact, after Guba, can we really talk about the concept of "networked authoritarianism" as really working so effectively?
4. Is there another model for Internet usage and societal change that might account for the actual fluctuations and moments of progress and regress? Can there be a pluralistic approach -- some people will try the hard stuff and get jailed; others will try the soft stuff and maybe live to cautiously discuss politics on a social forum; eventually those jailed may be released and those who were cautious may be radicalized for other reasons, or even out of a sense of solidarity?
5. Kendzior and Pearce challenge two statements by American leaders that sum up the hopes for the Internet in foreign policy, "Reagan's proclamation that the "Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microship" and "Secretary of State Clinton's bet than an open Internet will elad to stronger, more prosperous countries". But what's really wrong with these inspiring statements? They're true, broadly speaking. Faxes, Xerox machines, and CNN all had a lot to do with bringing the Soviet Union down after the failed coup, and arguably samizdat, that helped galvanize and link earlier movements of dissent, helped lay the groundwork for the following electronic age.
6. If we're to be cyber-skeptics about the efficacy of social media for changing regimes, and don't credit machinery with automatic effects on societies, why aren't we as skeptical of about the effectiveness of social media in the hands of those regimes? If it's powerless, it's powerless because not only machines effect or change human behaviour.
And a question to Tufecki:
7. You've applauded Twitter's decision to censor tweets at the request of even authoritarian governments, and even declared it a helpful decision for activists, on the theory that this will provide "transparency" about the bad actions of authoritarianism and help gain support for democracy causes. You cited the need to "follow the law".
But can you concede that "the law" in countries like Russia and China, as the Russian saying goes, is a bridle that can be turned hither and thither -- that these laws are not *just* laws that liberal democratic societies would declare as right. Why concede such lawlessness and legal nihilism?
As for the deterrent effect of the "transparency," several things could go wrong with that notion -- the system could be flooded and become so much noise that it can't be coherently analyzed; and authoritarians may not wait to request censorship by tweet, but will introduce their own software or regimes to either completely cut off Twitter, or block the view of certain accounts without even interacting with Twitter's central management. We are told this already happens with Facebook, where in countries like Uzbekistan, separate pages are said to be blocked (we've even heard of separate words or entries by certain people being blocked on Medvedev's Facebook page in Russia). It would be interesting to get a technical readout on whether/how that is happening. In other words, it's quite possible that before any magnificent "censor-by-tweet" and "censor-by-country" regime comes into effect, these networked authoritarians will pre-empt with their own filtration technology.
I realize that the questions I've outlined here are not likely to be asked, and the topics aren't even included in the agenda.
In fact, the sessions are about "identity" and "inequalities" -- two standard-issue "critical Marxist" sort of academic topics which regrettably provide endless opportunity for waxing at length about "identity as a construct" and "the inherent violence of the patriarchal society" and all the rest.
No doubt there will be a discussion of the "nym wars" if Jillian York is present, a topic where I've disagreed with her strenuously because the same anonymity that she wants to award as a special dispensation to her revolutionary friends in the Middle East can be/is used to harass and heckle and bully people on line with differing views from behind secret identities, and used of course by Anonymous to hack and avoid accountability. I don't believe all platforms should be forced to add the nym feature; it should be a voluntary policy and feature that they supply if they wish to take the customer service headaches that go with it.
As I've noted before, the nym wars, driven by hordes of revolutionaries, "progressives, " Anonymous e-thugs, hackers, etc. should be a separate topic from this: asking American companies not to turn over the private data of customers in any form to abusive authoritarian foreign governments or to our own government without a lawful court order.
Courtney is going to talk about "gender". See this discussion and this discussion for a gander on how badly women can be treated in York's company.
Finally, on a personal but definitely relevant political note, I'll say that any decent academic concerned about free speech and free intellectual inquiry both in academic and the wider culture of social media discussion must be actively alarmed at the manner in which Kendzior and Pearce (particularly Kendzior) tried to silence my critique of their academic work by making the most outrageous claims and spears. These two not only kept lobbing up @ tweets addressed to the front page of EurasiaNet where I previously worked, they went to the editor to complain about me and urge my removal. Incredibly, their machinations had an effect and an effort was made to put a total Twitter/social media gag on me to forbid me to discuss the region at all or debate anyone at all.
Naturally, I rejected that effort and when my contract expired, I indicated that I found the notion of a Twitter gag unacceptable for freelancers, especially in the absence of any contractual specification or any written policy.
I stand by everything I've written on Twitter -- there is nothing obscene or extreme there, no action that would constitute "bullying" or "stalking" -- the fake notions purveyed by these two net nannies -- that would warrant calling the police -- which is what Kendzior threatened to do to me (!) over my blog.
Networked authoritarianism! Coming soon to an academia near you.
Donkey parody video which led to sentencing of Azeri bloggers to jail.
The troubling article by Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce published in the Journal of Communication is now published here behind a paywall, where it will cost you $35 to access the article for 24 hours. Just like those old heady days of reading samizdat overnight -- except for that $35 part! Needless to say, I can't spend a day's grocery bill on these newly-baked "networked authoritarianism" gurus, so I will see if I can either get it in the NY public library or perhaps someone will have a copy in their office. Funny, both of them complain about paid academic content and boost open source stuff on Twitter, but their own article will cost you.
I wrote about my concerns related to their articlehere and here -- prompting both Kendzior and Pearce not only to react with thin-skinned fury but to start attacking me for "poor analytical skills" etc. myself. Academia is a terribly closed society and they are exemplary of some of the worst aspects of it -- stifling criticism, suppressing critics (Sarah assists Nathan Hamm in moderating at Registan, and is responsible for my banning from that site for criticizing the notorious Joshua Foust).
Like Evgeny Morozov, Kendzior and Pearce are anti-utopianist regarding the Internet and take almost glee in informing you just how bad authoritiaran states suppress it and how foolhardy dissenters are to resist this. And like Morozov, they discount anything but their own grim message and essentially counsel scholars -- and by implication policy-makers -- to accept this status-quo and not attempt to change it or look for alternative narratives. In reacting to hypotheses -- and documented evidence -- in the Middle East and Russia that purport to show that increased social network participation is leading to increased political activism (and that this starts with exposing the regimes' crimes), Kendzior says:
The “failures” – the many countries where the circulation of evidence of state crimes through social media prompts no change in state practices, and in some cases, dissuades citizens from joining activist causes – tend to go unmentioned. They are, I suspect, more the norm than the exception, and they have proven the rule in former Soviet authoritarian states.
The ellusive and changing and contradictory creature known as "the Internet" may not lend itself to firm pronouncements taken only in time-slices (the paper deals with the period 2009-2011) and things may be getting better or old conceptions being unravelled, but that's not the affair of anthropologists -- they need things to stay put.
In many places in the world, including in this region of Central Asia, documenting abuses by the regime leads to change. It may not be massive as in Tahrir Square or even in Bolotnaya Square, but it is something. Not so for Central Asia and the Caucasus, as Kendzior writes:
"In the Journal of Communication article, we suggest the opposite: that greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest."
I reject this thesis myself, and it's fairly easy to do so as more and more episodes pile up. As I noted, when protesters uploaded a video of an abusive governor in a province in Azerbaijan he was ultimately fired; protestors who had been arrested were freed; and increased scrutiny was given to the problems of injustice. Shh, don't tell Kendzior and Pearce! The story completely falls outside of their paradigm; indeed, it didn't fit in the framework of this EurasiaNet, author, either, but eventually the pressure of events caused him to revise his telling of the story.
It's not necessarily an indicator of anything big, given that Facebook is relatively new and there are other local social networking sites with more relevance, perhaps, but there are now 782,000 on Facebook in Azerbaijan, and their numbers have increased significantly as we can see from Socialbakers. By the way, Uzbekistan's numbers on Socialbakers, which Katy Pearce fiercely contested and demanded to know about the methodology -- as if this respected commercial agency cooperating with Facebook to report on its growth couldn't be trusted! -- are now rising substantially again -- to 128,680. That defies Kendzior's complaint that the growth rate was slowing so much last year that the numbers couldn't really be said to be evidence of a "surge". Look at the graph again. In all the countries of Eurasia except Turkmenistan they appear to be taking quite a jump. Sometimes the facts of real life get in the way of your academic thesis.
Regrettably, Luke Allnutt of RFE/RL tends to chase every "progressive" social media fad story that comes along has now celebrated Kendzior and Pearce -- and in a manner that I have to say is frankly disgusting -- by essentially trashing the "constricted" Soviet-era dissidents and "fractious" opposition today and indicating there is some shinier new Internety bunch who are "beyond politics" and now have "social media" instead of parties. Ugh:
When I first heard about Azerbaijan's "donkey bloggers," I couldn't help think of an opposition politician I had met on a reporting trip in the town of Lankoran, close to the border with Iran. The head of the local Musavat Party, Yadigar Sadigov, a genial and intellectual man, seemed to be the personification of the marginalized opposition in the former Soviet Union. His office was small, dark, with a few academic tomes, and posters curling up on the wall. He seemed resigned to the fate of being in a state of perpetual and nominal opposition. You didn't get the impression that this was an organization that was going to take down the Aliyev regime.
The donkey bloggers, on the other hand, were young, web-savvy, and English-speaking. The poster boys of Internet activism, Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli were jailed for 2 1/2 years for making a video mocking the government, which involved a man dressed up as a donkey. They were representative of a new generation, unburdened by the fractious politics of the traditional opposition or of the constrictive paradigms of Soviet-era dissidents. What tied their generation together were not political parties or ideology but rather social networks and the Internet.
Sigh. I shouldn't have to spend too much time explaining why Soviet-era dissidents were in "constrictive paradigms" -- but it might have to do with facing 7 years of labor camp and 5 years of exile merely for writing critical samizdat. I suppose it's fashionable to think of anti-communist Soviet dissidents as hopelessly mired in Cold War categories, but Sakharov's "Thoughts on Progress" and Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to Leaders" still make very interesting and relevant reading -- and there's the added creepy part where Putin embraced some of "Leaders" and visited Solzhenitsyn.
The age-old debates about whether capitalism or communism is better, or whether they even work, didn't go away, as unfashionable as the progs find it in the US -- it's still the essential argument of the Internet, collectivism and "sharing" and copyleftism and memes, or the individual and freedom of expression and privacy.
So to suggest that the opposition figures in places like Azerbaijan are marginal, doomed, out of touch, fractious -- gosh, that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they are too often persecuted and sent to jail, would it!
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