Mission almost accomplished for Mr. Morozov -- with his obsessive and public crusade against Haystack, he's likely paralyized the State Department's admittedly giddy and over-shared program to enable dissident Iranians to escape state censorship of the Internet; he's rejoiced in the fall of Jared Cohen (I was a big critic too but I thought it better if he stayed in place and became more moderate and reformed); he's trashed Hillary Clinton's Internet freedom program in a hundred ways; he's bashed Facebook and Twitter for not joining the latest group grope -- all with deftly distracting everyone's attention from the fact that he himself doesn't have a positive plan for Internet freedom, and doesn't fight the tyrants himself. In fact, a lot of the time, even when Morozov seems to banging on the Kremlin for evil control of the Internet, he winds up making it seem like the *real* problem in the world is the naive Americans who let them, never the Russians plotting to undermine Internet freedom. Russian investors are evil because they invest in...Facebook, not only because they snuggle up to the Kremlin.So, honestly, how do you differ from the repressive regimes you claim are winning because of the West's inept program to fight them? What's *your* plan?!
As usual, I could almost agree with Morozov's grand debunking of some of the more fatuous sides of the Obama Administration's Internet Freedom plan (It's really Hillary's initiative) -- except, again, what I want is not *death* but *reform*. I marvel that Morozov can roll his eyes and arch his eyebrows with blogging like this:
Silicon Valley CEOs do join American diplomats to exotic locals like Siberia, Syria and Iraq -- such practices have now been codified as "tech delegations" -- and no one is hiding the fact that Washington expects to profit from Silicon Valley's Internet brands and services. Likewise, the very same CEOs and other technology industry insiders are invited to private dinners with the Secretary of State
-- and yet doesn't point out more old-fashioned lures like the Russian purchase of $4 billion of Boeing planes or Intel's $1 billion to help Skolkovo -- that happen without benefit of Twitter.
Yes, Morozov does good work in pointing out the cosy relationship between Google and state power:Most disturbingly, more and more leading practitioners of "21st century statecraft" at the State Department are jumping ship and leaving to work for the very CEOs they have just been escorting around the globe. See Katie Stanton's departure to work for Twitter and Jared Cohen's announced departure to work for Google -- the two career moves that, in my opinion, did not get the level of public attention that they truly deserve. (In all fairness, Stanton came to the government from Google -- but I think this only strengthens the overall argument about the mostly invisible revolving door between Silicon Valley and Washington).
Er, "more and more" isn't...two...as indicated here. Names, please of others? As I myself said, this Snowcrashian trajectory is worrisome because of Google's excessive influence on the government, but it is also about the inablity of government to keep reformers -- or rather, the instability of reforms, and unwillingness of young people in office to make public service the sacrifice it needs to be.
And Morozov bashes Facebook and Twitter for not joining the Global Network Initiative -- but the GNI itself is an amalgam of copyleftists and human rights purists without a clear agenda for freedom of expression, as distinct from "freedom from the copyright regime" which is what Electric Frontier Foundation and some of the others are about. I don't think this unwieldy group is particularly effective. The question of how/whether Internet corporations should become involved in the human rights struggle is a good one, but in fact there isn't anything special about new shiny social media companies that is any different from the same problems Coca Cola or Continental Grain faced with the Soviet Union. They can't leave markets and potential markets of the world unattended, and if they go into countries fighting the dissidents' battles, they will not retain their presence. I'm not for making it easy for them to make such immoral choices, but the role of human rights groups is different than corporations, and throwing Heidegger (who was popular at least when I went to university) at the problem won't solve the modern dilemmas, either. You don't drink Coke, Evgeny?
Even so, I'm grateful to Morozov for the public service of pointing out what never can be said enough, the disgraceful boosting of their friends that the Twitter devs engineered by putting them in the "suggested to follow" list. That means new media wasn't just a democratizing tool, but perpetuated lefty hacker culture by virtue of privileging those with those views with a significant technological head start the rest of us never got. The "suggestions" weren't the half of the fix, however: first, the devs enabled only their A listers and early adapters to have the ability to add huge numbers of followers with special automatic script that the rest of us couldn't access or deploy, and had to top off at 2,000 -- until we got more people to follow us.
Morozov is right that the State Department Internet policy -- and I would add the entire Gov 2.0 gravy train -- needs much more scrutiny and criticism of the kind that now-embedded hacker heroes like Anil Dash (founder of this very blog platform) will never give it. Morozov implies that the Berkman Center, recipient of some State Department grants, is not in a position to give it.
But the problem isn't that Berkman is getting a State Department grant; the problem is that they hold -- unacknowledged and unchallenged -- the sort of "progressive" views that resist any plurality of approaches or diversity and are not honest brokers for this debate for that reason. They have certain doctrinal views -- oh, about the ineffectiveness of Twitter revolutions they don't like (Moldova); about copyright needing "balance" (elimination?); about Israel (all refugees should return); about extremists like the Taliban (they should be allowed on the Global Voices blog platform, too) -- and there is little scope for debating them because they control the discourse and the resources. In fact, Morozov's own political comfort zone seems to coincide with the Berkman Center's -- he's more torqued about the supposed conflict of interest in such grants than in their lefty views. Nowadays, so many NGOs get government grants and pursue them even more vigorously under Obama, that he should widen out his scope.
But then he gets downright loony:
Similarly, one reason to be suspicious of "Internet freedom" as a priority for U.S. foreign policy is that the end result of pursuing it may have an extremely corrosive effect on the rest of foreign policy making....Nothing in what the U.S. State Department has done so far convinces me that they have much awareness -- let alone a roadmap (and those they usually have in abundance!) -- for dealing with the spillover effects that the promotion of either "Internet freedom" or "21st century statecraft" will have on the rest of foreign policy making.
Um, how? Er, by a javascript going haywire on Twitter? Here, Morozov, who has been hiding away and writing a book, becomes dense and unpenetrable. Apparently he's bothered by the fact that the Internet and social media are unpredictable, and therefore defy the laws of political science as once taught.
Then, he caps it off with a finger-wagging statement like this:
What we are left with, as a result, is a counterproductive debate about censorship (and that debate itself has been taken over by lobbyists touting their own censorship-circumvention tools) rather than a much more important and far-reaching global debate about the future of foreign policy in the digital era.
Oh, pshaw. Lobbyists get to tout -- this is America! And timid NGOs should step up and monitor this more than they have been -- except, oops, they're all in bed in a hybrid body with the very targets of what should be their their activism -- the corporations themselves in the global intiative Morozov is touting. And...why can't the debate be about the concrete issue of censorship, Evgeny, that the vague thumb-sucking "foreign policy in the digital era"? Aren't you for fighting censorship...somehow...or do you think what you imply, that the dictators get to win because they seem stronger?
Look, it's actually not so complex: "First, we shape the tools. Then we are shaped by the tools," as Marshall McLuhan explained. The problem isn't the tools or the policy, but the reality that America has worked itself out of a job. It has made the world safer for democracy, and now we see BRIC -- and a diminished America. And maybe that's ok...
But no, with Morozov's take on "21st Century Statecraft" -- you are well on your way to the usual Morozov recipe -- pick on something problematic -- real or imagined -- in a freedom fight -- blow it up to epidemic proportions, denounce the venal ruthlessly -- and then pronounce all freedom-fighting as corrupt and self-serving -- and let the tyrants win.
Someone named Bob Jacobson takes this discussion in a more explicitly political direction, following up on the Snowcrashian implications of the increasingly privatized foreign policy. That for me was most emblematic recently in the spectacle of USAID and Chevron holding capacity-building seminars for Turkmen accountants to bring them up to speed to world standards -- Chevron has been waiting in the wings for some time on the Turkmen president's whim, to see if a permit to drill on the Caspian Sea shelf will be in the offing. The training has the double-edged value of enabling Chevron not to wait for state reforms in this area, which could be slow, and also gaining some good connections among future officials but the part where their corporate human rights policies hit the metal not very clear.
But where Bob lost me is when he used the word "neoliberal" -- always a marker for a Marxist coming down the tracks who is going to Blame Amerika First instead of kleptocratic and murderous third world tyrants. Government-business partnerships such as might occur at a trade expo aren't what is evil per se; it's the cross purposes of doing business with tyrannical regimes that harm their people -- and running the risk of retarding movements for change rather showing solidarity to them. "Neoliberal" isn't the global problem as much as the remnants -- mutations? -- everywhere of Marxist and Soviet economic theories about evil capitalists -- now dressed up in the fashionable modern clothing of human rights lexicon.
Morozov mightily scorns the legacy of the Congress of Cultural Freedom -- but what *does* a democratic foreign policy look like and how can the U.S. support forces abroad that are not only in its interests, but worthy of support on grounds of principle and solidarity? What, Morozov is not for having given any money to Poland's Solidarity for printing presses in the 1980s? He's not for using some of our taxpayer's dollars to get computers or phones for people in Iran fighting the regime today? Why?! Because it might hurt a dissident who is caught with a Haystack program?
Could we let *them* be the judge of that, please, and not TED talkers?
Why would it be ok for say, the Green Party of Germany to support a peace or trade union group abroad in a repressive country, but not the U.S.?!
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