2/C PMS (BLACK + 809) SOFT-TOUCH MATTE LAMINATION + SPOT GLOSS THE NET DELUSION EVGENY MOROZOV POLITICS/TECHNOLOGY $27.95/$35.50 CAN “ Evgeny Morozov is wonderfully knowledgeable about the Internet—he seems “THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TWITTERED!” to have studied every use of it, or every political use, in every country in the declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after world (and to have read all the posts). And he is wonderfully sophisticated and protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for tough-minded about politics. This is a rare combination, and it makes for a all the talk about the democratizing power powerful argument against the latest versions of technological romanticism. of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China His book should be required reading for every political activist who hopes to are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, ALEXANDER KRSTEVSKI ALEXANDER change the world on the Internet.” —MICHAEL WALZER, Institute for authoritarian governments are effectively Advanced Study, Princeton using the Internet to suppress free speech, EVGENY MOROZOV hone their surveillance techniques, dissem- is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy “ Evgeny Morozov has produced a rich survey of recent history that reminds us inate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify and Boston Review and a Schwartz Fellow that everybody wants connectivity but also varying degrees of control over their populations with digital entertain- at the New American Foundation. Morozov content, and that connectivity on its own is a very poor predictor of political ment. Could the recent Western obsession is currently also a visiting scholar at Stan- pluralism.... By doing so, he’s gored any number of sacred cows, but he’s likewise with promoting democracy by digital ford University. He was previously a Yahoo! given us a far more realistic sense of what’s possible in cyberspace—both good means backfire? Fellow at the Institute for the Study of and bad—in the years ahead. Morozov excels at this sort of counter-intuitive Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a analysis, and he instantly recasts a number of foreign policy debates with this In this spirited book, journalist and social fellow at the Open Society Institute in New timely book.” —THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, author, The Pentagon’s New Map, commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that York, where he remains on the board of and senior managing director, Enterra Solutions LLC by falling for the supposedly democratizing the Information Program. Morozov’s writings nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders have appeared in the Economist, Newsweek, “Net Delusion is a brilliant book and a great read. Politicians and pundits have may have missed how it also entrenches the Wall Street Journal, the International hailed the Internet as a revolutionary force that will empower the masses and dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, Slate, consign authoritarian governments to the ash-heap of history, but Morozov harder—not easier—to promote democracy. Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, explains why such naïve hopes are sadly misplaced. With a keen eye for detail Buzzwords like “twenty-first-century state- the San Francisco Chronicle, Prospect, Dis- and a probing, skeptical intelligence, he shows that the Web is as likely to distract craft” sound good in PowerPoint presentations, sent, and many other publications. He has as to empower, and that both dictators and dissidents can exploit its novel but the reality is that “digital diplomacy” appeared on CNN, CBS, SkyNews, CBC, Al requires just as much oversight and consid- features. If you thought that Facebook, Twitter, and the World Wide Web “ Evgeny Morozov offers a rare note of wisdom Jazeera International, France 24, Reuters TV, would trigger a new wave of democratic transformations, read this book and eration as any other kind of diplomacy. and common sense, on an issue overwhelmed NPR, BBC Radio 4, and BBC World Service. think again.” —STEPHEN M. WALT, Belfer Professor of International Affairs, Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov by digital utopians.” —MALCOLM GLADWELL Harvard University shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently lib- JACKET DESIGN BY PETE GARCEAU erating and why ambitious and seemingly $27.95/$35.50 CAN noble initiatives like the promotion of AVAILABLE AS AN E-BOOK “Internet freedom” might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole. VISIT WWW.PUBLICAFFAIRSBOOKS.COM SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER WWW.PUBLICAFFAIRSBOOKS.COM SPOT GLOSS AREAS INDICATED ON PAGE 2 1586488741-Morozov_Layout 1 10/19/10 10:27 AM Page 1 chapter one The Google Doctrine n June 2009 thousands of young Iranians—smartphones in their hands (and, for the more advanced, Bluetooth headsets in their Iears)—poured into the stuffy streets of Tehran to protest what they be- lieved to be a fraudulent election. Tensions ran high, and some protesters, in an unthinkable offense, called for the resignation of Ayatollah Khamenei. But many Iranians found the elections to be fair; they were willing to defend the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if needed. Iranian society, buffeted by the conflicting forces of populism, conservatism, and modernity, was facing its most serious political crisis since the 1979 revolution that ended the much-disliked reign of the pro- American Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But this was not the story that most Western media chose to priori- tize; instead, they preferred to muse on how the Internet was ushering in democracy into the country. “The Revolution Will Be Twittered” was the first in a series of blog posts published by the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan a few hours after the news of the protests broke. In it, Sullivan zeroed in on the resilience of the popular microblogging site Twitter, arguing that “as the regime shut down other forms of communication, 1 1586488741-Morozov_Layout 1 10/19/10 10:27 AM Page 2 2 The Net Delusion Twitter survived. With some remarkable results.” In a later post, even though the “remarkable results” were still nowhere to be seen, Sullivan proclaimed Twitter to be “the critical tool for organizing the resistance in Iran” but didn’t bother to quote any evidence to support his claim. Only a few hours after the protests began, his blog emerged as a major information hub that provided almost instantaneous links to Iran-related developments. Thousands of readers who didn’t have the stamina to browse hundreds of news sites saw events unfolding in Iran primarily through Sullivan’s eyes. (And, as it turned out, his were a rather opti- mistic pair.) It didn’t take long for Sullivan’s version of events to gain hold else- where in the blogosphere—and soon enough, in the traditional media as well. Michelle Malkin, the right-wing blogging diva, suggested that “in the hands of freedom-loving dissidents, the micro-blogging social network is a revolutionary samizdat—undermining the mullah-cracy’s information blockades one Tweet at a time.” Marc Ambinder, Sullivan’s colleague at the Atlantic, jumped on the bandwagon, too; for him, Twit- ter was so important that he had to invent a new word, “protagonal,” to describe it. “When histories of the Iranian election are written, Twitter will doubtless be cast a protagonal technology that enabled the pow- erless to survive a brutal crackdown,” wrote Ambinder on his blog. The Wall Street Journal’s Yochi Dreazen proclaimed that “this [revolution] would not happen without Twitter,” while National Public Radio’s Daniel Schorr announced that “in Iran, tyranny has run afoul of tech- nology in the form of the Internet, turning a protest into a movement.” When Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times asserted that in “the quintessential 21st-century conflict . on one side are government thugs firing bullets . [and] on the other side are young protesters fir- ing ‘tweets,’” he was simply registering the zeitgeist. Soon technology pundits, excited that their favorite tool was all over the media, were on the case as well. “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and trans- formed by social media,” proclaimed New York University’s Clay Shirky in an interview with TED.com. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard academic and the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, alleged 1586488741-Morozov_Layout 1 10/19/10 10:27 AM Page 3 The Google Doctrine 3 that “Twitter, in particular, has proven particularly adept at organizing people and information.” John Gapper, a business columnist for the Fi- nancial Times, opined that Twitter was “the tinderbox that fanned the spark of revolt among supporters of Mir-Hossein Moussavi.” Even the usually sober Christian Science Monitor joined in the cyber-celebrations, noting that “the government’s tight control of the Internet has spawned a generation adept at circumventing cyber road blocks, making the country ripe for a technology-driven protest movement.”* Twitter seemed omnipotent—certainly more so than the Iranian po- lice, the United Nations, the U.S. government, and the European Union. Not only would it help to rid Iran of its despicable leader but also convince ordinary Iranians, most of whom vehemently support the government’s aggressive pursuit of nuclear enrichment, that they should stop their perpetual fretting about Israel and simply go back to being their usual peaceful selves. A column in the right-wing Human Events declared that Twitter had accomplished “what neither the U.N. nor the European Union have [sic] been able to do,” calling it “a huge threat to the Iranian regime—a pro-liberty movement being fomented and organized in short sentences.” Likewise, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal argued that “the Twitter-powered ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran .