"The fascists didn't detect the spy. Stierlitz was inimitable once again." Russian LolCats. This one draws on the line of jokes related to fictional spy Stierlitz.
Ethan Zuckerman's "cute cats theory of revolution" is getting a lot of attention now and given it's already-viral subject, it's likely to become a staple theory in communications departments in many places. But it doesn't work everywhere, especially in the places where Ethan -- or the Internet itself -- don't tend to go, namely the countries of the former Soviet Union (only 30 percent of Russians have Internet access; this thins to 20 or 10 or less in Central Asia).Where will the cute cats of Belarus go with the new anti-Internet laws that appear to criminalize the registration of domains and even the use of foreign web sites?
While cats are cute, dissident cats aren't cute enough. When Oleg Kashin was brutally beaten into a coma for covering the environmental protests in Khimki and other critical blogging, only a few hundred people spoke up and probably only a few thousand followed his fate. His writing and the news of his beating relied on the Internet, but numerous chatters and bloggers on Live Journal and Vkontakte and even Twitter didn't feel any solidarity -- at least, not enough to overcome their fears or sense that the dissident had "gone too far," to stop looking at rap videos.
Today, Kashin is a figure with far more prominence as hundreds of thousands of people have spilled out on to the streets with their iphones, pledging first on Facebook to appear. Those people weren't looking at only cat pictures the other day -- they are intellectuals who work in banks or scientific institutes or nonprofits and discuss the issues of the day more privately, not even with a blog pseudonym. But they are not protesting -- and won't protest -- what happened to Kashin. They are protesting a sense of indignation and shame that Putin could merely switch places with Medvedev and cancel out their vote.
When a communist organizer of protests against the vote, Sergei Udaltsov, was arrested on the pretext of jaywalking and went on a hunger strike, only a few hundred people showed up to protest, even though only days before, 50,000 more had appeared in a sanctioned meeting. That lets you know where "the Arab Spring" stands in Russia. Internet or no Internet, solidarity has its limits, especially if it is a matter of principle, for someone whose views you may not share (he is a radical communist).
And just like the Arab Spring is problematic, so are the Russian upheavals. The "Youtube Cop" who was so popular last year with hundreds of thousands of views, speaking up about corruption in the police such as bribe-taking and beating, is now living in obscurity. Not only because the civil rights nature of his cause never caught on, but because he himself tends toward the extreme -- he is a survivalist, with guns, and has been spouting Ron Paul-like stuff now on Youtube, and turned off most mainstream users. And that's how it goes. Russians can raptuously listen for a time to the holy fool, the downtrodden victim of the all-powerful state, sometimes in surprising ways -- but then just as quickly turn their back on them.
Lots and lots of people have adapted to social media and enthusiastically use Youtube and Facebook. Facebook has become particularly important to the Russian anti-corruption and anti-election fraud movement as Live Journal has proved politically and technically unreliable.But ultimately, the anti-corruption movement is what some more powerful political leaders and corporate bosses use against others who are less powerful -- it's a tool for struggle when everyone is implicated.
I feel that when theories like this are developed, technologists are mainly celebrating social media as an instrument of their own establishment's power, baking their own technolibertarian or technocommunist ideologies into the tools. It's not people's inherent decency or the capacity for organic solidarity with other humans that is celebrated, but a tool that compels people who didn't care and won't go on caring to selfishly fight at least for their cute-cat privileges. It's reductivist and cynical. Ultimately, Zuckerman privileges the revolutionary capacity of networking technology over organic people; they seem not to matter. He believes that lots of cute-cat lovers who wouldn't become involved in condemning police brutality will become radicalized if their cute-cat-loving tool, Youtube, becomes threatened by the state, and then can be instrumentally and opportunistically enlisted in radical causes. It comes from the same "progressive" opera as the notion that people don't want to be separated from their guns and religion.
People are more complex, of course. First, the people aren't so stupid as to only love cats. The class of people who tend to show up first as early adapters and then the later social users themselves are not typical of their countries, especially in countries with low Internet penetration. They're not such dummies; they're already predisposed to alternative culture and already may share the views of those who are publicly more active but simply wish to hang on to their state-provided jobs or have a healthy disrespect for "professional revolutionaries" after centuries of upheavals.
More worrisome, while liberals can be empowered, a significant segment of the people who aren't dummies and have more to them than cat-loving aren't necessarily a force for human rights. In Russia and the other post-Soviet states, there is a class of young technologists who, if anything, have been hostile to past and present movements for human rights and if anything, harbour views antithetical to them loyal to a strong, nationalist state. It's no accident that Surkov, the Kremlin's grey cardinal has been put in charge of "modernization" and "innovation," such as the Russian "Silicon Valley" project of Skolkovo. The Kremlin recognizes that the class of young technologists are their social base, alongside the millions of pensioners and state workers they hold in thrall with state salaries who don't have Internet access. The bar-camping set are utterly cynical about universal human rights and have never read Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov; they don't talk about dissidents past or present because they are carving out a space where they can live comfortably with the state -- active, creative, but managed.
When Microsoft gives grants to NGOs in the US, they select organizations involved in a wide variety of causes from anti-poverty to women's rights; the Russian Microsoft very selectively gave donations only to benign groups involved in culture or children, even as some NGOs involved in more challenging programs such as environmental protest were arrested and speciously charged, with the help of Microsoft lawyers, for supposed software piracy. I went many, many rounds of argument with the Microsoft RU representive on Twitter over these issues; the cynical arrogance with which these technologists feel they can ignore basic due process and civil rights and privilege themselves as state loyalists is shocking. Lolcat lovers (as distinct from real sentimental cute cat picture lovers) don't make for good democrats; they are not "for our freedom and yours"; they are for freedom of expression for me and not for thee; your information wants to be free, mine is available only for a fee.
This bureaucratic-technological class is visible all over the former Soviet Union; the group of bloggers taken on the official trip to Zhanaozen in Kazakhstan are a good example. Their job is to serve as the new technologically-aware loyal opposition -- to criticize the obvious about mismanagement or corruption, but not to threaten the state and the current regime itself. They're good at this; they're technically savvy, good communicators on blogs and Youtube and they've learned how to become like good Silicon Valley influencers using the same formula Scoble or LaPorte or Arrington use -- gain lots of followers and friends, and then deploy social media, which is inherently a talk-back tool, in fact to broadcast to the masses, identify fans and critical but docile supporters, and mute or ban or hide everybody else as "uncivil". The tools are great for filtering like that.
Cory Doctorow's gushing enthusiasm for Zuckerman's cute-cat theory isn't just a theory for Internet penetration and more broadband for the masses. That's the cover story. What he makes clear in his Guardian piece is that he wants social media companies to "harden up" for the job of social revolution, and for Western governments to get out of the way of the Internet with things like the Stop Online Piracy Act, so that they aren't "snooping on populations" and behaving "just like" China.
In other words, he wants a wired state for himself and his likeminded friends.
No thanks. The first thing Cory Doctorow did when I challenged him on Twitter -- that his theory that you should "give away" content as a business model only worked for a few like him that had high lecture fees -- was to urge that I be banned from Twitter. In this heated debate, I mistakenly attributed to him the practice of having Indian typists make old online books for free -- it was actually his friend Julian Dibbell who did this. I corrected the record but persisted in my critique. That was not enough. Not only did Cory block me and abuse report me and continue to threaten me, he got Charles Arthur, the Guardian's tech-thug, in on the act, and Arthur began to cast around for what he could "get on me". He decided that screenshots of Cory Doctor's public appearance in Second Life at a book-reading, a historic event where the first book was also published within the virtual world, were something like "Internet stalking". It would be like saying that taking a picture of Cory Doctorow at a real-life book reading and putting it on your blog was "harassment." Absurd. Mysteriously, an album of these pictures all disappeared off my blog -- techs always have tech friends at other tech places. I don't know if "copyright infringement" was even invoked falsely here -- it was odd.
That and a hundred thousand other examples are why we can't have these people in charge of the Internet, nor can social media sites be asked to "harden" against them and "soften" governments to enable them to have their way. They only want power; they are not devoted to all human rights for all. They also lie; it's not possible for everyone to give away books for free and still make a living; only those who write books about how you can do that with big connections to get hefty lecture fees can get away with this folly.
The inherent contradiction involved in the technologists wishing to wrest power with these tools is obvious: In the Guardian piece, Doctorow first asks for social media companies to "harden" up so that activists could be safe -- allow pseudonyms and refuse to turn over data about revolutionaries to governments -- and then in the next paragraph begins talking not about Belarus or Egypt or Iran but...WikiLeaks, revealing his hand.
This week, the case for "hardening up" social media against hackers stealing classified military documents was lost. The Department of Justice demanded that Twitter turn over the records of four accounts of hackers and supporters of WikiLeaks, first in a secret national security letter, an action that has drawn fire from many civil rights advocates. Ultimately, this request was made public, but then the efforts of lawyers for the defendants, and the ACLU, failed. A judge has just ruled that Twitter has to turn over these records. The civil rights arguments made -- that the defendants should have another court appearance to defend their cases -- were not ruled relevant. That's because Twitter isn't any more special than the telephone. The government and the military are investigating the cases of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, and they were able to demonstrate that they have "probable cause" to legitimately investigate suspects in a crime, and that cause was acknowledged.
To hear Mashable and the other widely-read tech press tell it, this effort failed because some gross violation of civil rights occurred. I'm not certain of that at all. What failed was the civil libertarian argument to keep protecting social media users involved in the crime of stealing classified documents because there was indeed "probable cause" to believe a crime had occurred and ample reason for law-enforcement to investigate with the use of the equivalent of phone records. Twitter isn't more special than Verizon when it comes to providing a hardened safe haven for suspects.
What this is really about is a struggle for power of radical geeks with specific ideologies and agendas. Doctorow says nothing about how we are all supposed to deal with massive crimes involved in hacking Sony or the Pentagon or Stratfor or even Gawker. Why do these e-thugs get to take away the rights of all those institutions, where we are customers, or which are appointed through our elected representatives?
This struggle for power isn't trivial or abstract; Vincent Cerf is denying Internet access as a human right precisely to prevent governments from getting in on the act of securing it and hold his company to account -- he has advanced the theory, in line with Zuckerman's and Doctorow's, that technologists will secure these rights for us. Although they are not a state, and they haven't signed any international treaties, nor -- most importantly!!! -- are they subject to an independently-elected parliament or an independent judiciary or an executive rooted in the rule of law.
Doctorow's political plan speaks to the aggressive agenda of the hard left -- deprive our liberal democratic government of the ability to have any type of surveillance whatsoever or any kill-switches -- even if massive crimes such as Anonymous perpetrates take place, and even if Iran or China seizes control of our Internet.
Next, Doctorow opportunistically links his long-time struggle against copyright and therefore copyright enforcement surveillance to the "global justice struggles" claiming "you can't make a system that prevents spying by secret police and allows spying by media giants". Sure you can; geeks make systems to stop malware all the time. PS, they enable filtering of critics all the time, too, more massively than any China or Russia, and responding to complaints of piracy by intellectual property owners and targeting piracy sites doesn't harm freedom in the way Doctorow is pretending to further his aim of eliminating digital property rights.
Finally, Doctorow urges that "architectural changes" be made to help make users more anonymous so they can't be caught -- which of course favours the thuggish Anonymous and the cause of piracy, and other crimes -- stormtroopers that Doctorow and others seem happy to harness in their cause of seizing the Internet for their own.
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