‘They are young, tech-savvy and determined to fight for democracy in Russia,’ wrote Tony Halpin of The Times, the day after protests erupted in the wake of Russia’s contested 2011 December elections, ‘The protestors…represent a new generation of activist, using the internet and social media to outwit the Kremlin.’ For those who have followed the roller-coaster ride of global uprisings and protest movements since history was supposed to end in 1989, these words sound familiar. Does anyone remember what the journalist-cum-tech-savvy-blogger Malcolm Gladwell said about Iran’s so-called ‘Twitter Revolution’ of 2009? ‘The Revolution will be Tweeted!’ he jubilantly announced, and all across the western world fellow observers enthusiastically tweeted agreement.
The revolutionary democratic power of the internet is the trump-card of ‘cyber-utopian’ visionaries. Its organising and mobilising potential, its ability to broadcast suppressed information, as well as give international publicity to even the most obscure protest movements, is what the internet offers us, and the evidence is everywhere. As one Egyptian activist tweeted during the recent uprisings of Tahrir Square, ‘We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world!’
But the internet’s power to improve our world could go further. The logical conclusion of some cyber-utopian thinking reaches the realms of the metaphysical. For example, the trans-humanism of computer scientists like Ray Kurzweil, the idea that soon we could transcend the very essence of humanity and physical existence through the power of the internet. Or less Star Wars, more cyberArcadia: the internet as a means to overhaul the old hierarchical power-structures and replace them with harmonious, self-organising networks existing online. It is the first strand in the broad church of ‘cyber-utopianism’ which has become entrenched in the mindset of elites in the West.
Led by the US, Western leaders have embarked on a crusade for internet freedom, as declared by Hilary Clinton in 2010, ‘an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries’. The link between a free internet online and a liberal democracy on the ground is considered absolutely self-evident. This is the ‘Age of Information’, and those perennial thorns in the Western side – the undemocratic totalitarians and the ageing dictators and autocrats – will inevitably be swept aside by the forces of technological determinism. Free-flowing information can certainly facilitate revolution. Yet it does not mean that a linear path towards liberal democracy is necessarily the inevitable consequence.
As many commentators have pointed out, the Arab Spring bears much resemblance to the half-realised revolutions which erupted across Europe in 1848: born in the context of new technological developments and a sudden wave of unprecedented global interconnectivity, these 19th century uprisings broke out amidst an atmosphere of heady hope and expectation. Within a year, however, things had turned sour: the very technology which had helped make revolution possible – the new railway networks – was swiftly turned on the people as the newly-appointed Emperor of the French, Napoleon III, used them to rapidly deposit armed forces in the capital in order to restore order and complete the counter-revolution.
Today, the internet too has been used by the forces of order for their own self-preservation: the Iranian government, for example, has used the internet to spread its own propaganda, hone its surveillance techniques and suppress free speech. Technological utopianism appears much less credible once the new technology becomes yet another tool available to strengthen the grip of a modern totalitarian regime. One of the fiercest critics of the impact of social media on politics is Andrew Keen, author of up-coming ‘Digital Vertigo’. The most interesting problem for Keen is the impact networks like Twitter and Facebook are having on the development of coherent political organisation.
He cites the example of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and points out that, rather than conferring unambiguous benefits on the movement, the centrality of social media has resulted in ‘an incredibly individualised and fragmented movement, where everyone is online using social media and everyone is using it to articulate their own ideas and tell their own stories’. According to Keen, Occupy failed because it rejected any kind of ideological commitment, and instead, totally overwhelmed by its online presence, drowned in ‘a cacophony of individualised voices’. Could the Civil Rights Movement, for example, or Women’s Suffrage, have been achieved if the key individuals had led their followers online rather than on the ground?
For US foreign policy expert Golnaz Esfandiari, the danger of Facebook and Twitter is that they ‘limit people to a virtual world’ and make people lazy. ‘You just sit on your computer; you click on a few pages… support this, support that…free this activist, save this prisoner’. In Egypt and Tunisia, however, this was far from the case: ‘these are not Facebook Revolutions or Twitter Revolutions; these are people’s revolutions, led by people brave enough to take to the streets’.
The ultimate danger of today’s pervasive ‘cyber-utopianism’ is that we, in our modern age of political disillusionment, attempt to by-pass traditional methods of political protest and organisation. Seduced by the utopian promises of the cyber-world, we may slip into the comfortable complacency of the virtual alternative. As documentary-maker Adam Curtis has said, ‘Democracy needs proper politics…it’s as if these people assembled spontaneously on Twitter and they just want freedom. But what kind of society do they want?’
