Internet-Driven Democracy Is No Techno-Utopia

Today’s Wall Street Journal The Myth of the Techno-Utopia hits home.

There’s a basic assumption among Westerners that ‘free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization afforded by blogs and social networks, leads to the opening up of authoritarian societies and their eventual democratization.’

I was part of such an effort in the Lubna Hussein, and it worked.

Will the Internet impact long-term freedoms for women in Sudan? Or will it results in repressive censorship of the Internet, as it is in Iran, where our traffic has died totally. A successful event doesn’t not deliver the big-picture goal.

In Iran the authorities have banned Gmail, replacing it with a national email system run by the government. Talk about Big Bro watching you!

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vows to make Internet freedom one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy, and one senator after another issues calls to “tear down this cyber wall” and allocate more funding to groups that promote Internet freedom and fight online censorship without giving much thought to the footnotes. via WSJ

We support the idea at Anne of Carversville, but let’s not be naive on this subject.

The Internet also gives governments an entirely new way of watching citizens, tracking them cyberspace. Granted, repressive governments must operate on multiple fronts, including texting — which is how we operated in the Lubna Hussein case, when her case came to court.

Messages left a Sudan courtroom bound for Egypt, most likely. For good reasons, I don’t know my partners by name and location. The message was translated and sent to me here in New York, where it was posted on Facebook, Tumblr and A of C within 10 minutes.

The new Internet democracy movement is nimble and clever. But as the WSJ writes, its obstacles for success are many and formidable.

Guns are always stronger on the short-term. But the Internet does open up new channels of diplomatic cooperation and assist for regular people who believe in global cooperation and friendships that go beyond national borders and politics.

Many of us can play short-term roles that lay fallow after an event concludes,  waiting for the next mini mission. In my case, I will be contacted when I am useful.

Internet communication does travel honestly and unfettered. I don’t believe that governments are rewriting text messages as we speak. One must always evaluate the editorial bias of the website publishing any version of global events because ‘truth’ has different meaning to different people. 

The role of the Internet activist and journalist will increase in the coming years, but as WSJ reminds us, the future isn’t a techno-utopia.

In fact, with the growth of cyber crime and multinational penetration by internatlonal cyber networks, our techno innovations represent risks that are probably second only to nuclear war and a massive bioterrorism outbreak, in terms of their impact on global populations, including America.

Life is dicey. Anne

Read on The Myth of the Techno-Utopia WSJ

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