Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
A recent New York Times poll suggests that Americans are in a dark mood. 70% of people think the country is moving in the wrong direction, a number not seen since the peak of the Great Recession two years ago. Their frustration may stem from higher gas prices or continued unemployment, but at least some commentators believe that a key factor is popular frustration with a dysfunctional government that doesn’t seem able to address the issues the US is facing.
The near-shutdown of the US government a few weeks back helps illustrate the dysfunction. Web pioneer Philip Greenspun tries to put the fight over $38 billion in spending in perspective by dividing budget numbers by 100 million. With a little mathematical analogizing, the nation’s $3.82 trillion federal budget and $1.65 trillion debt turns into a family income of $21,700, annual spending of $38,200 and credit card debt increasing by $16,500 annually. At this scale, the debate over “the largest domestic spending cut in US history” turns into a spat over a $380 cable bill when, perhaps, we should be worrying about defaulting on the mortgage. (Or, perhaps, we should realize that Greenspun’s metaphor, useful for understanding scale, might not serve us well in considering debt and spending. Americans go deep into debt to purchase houses. Is our overspending analogous to a mortgage? The analogy would be more apt if we were spending on infrastructure or education, rather than on social security and medicare.)
Fareed Zakaria, often one of the more thoughtful commentators on America’s role in the world, offers little encouragement in a recent essay in Time. Titled “Are America’s Best Days Behind Us“, Zakaria warns that the US is starting to look a bit like Britain after World War II, suffering from a sclerosis tied to success. Content with our position in the world, he warns, we may have lost sight of the fact that other nations are investing more heavily in infrastructure, education and research and development, and that our comfortable economic leadership may be rapidly receding into the past. He observes that the US government is spending $4 on the elderly (who vote) for every $1 spent on those under 18 (who don’t), and wonders whether we’ve moved from attempting to win the future to protecting the past, a stance that’s likely to be futile in the long run.
Zakaria pins the blame squarely on our political culture, specifically on an allergy to compromise that apparently affects both Republicans and Democrats. Solutions to America’s problems involve raising taxes and cutting benefits, making government more efficient and investing in future-oriented programs, building infrastructure and sponsoring research and development. Our political discourse has become highly polarized, perhaps not to an unprecedented level (it’s wise to remember that our political history has a rich tradition of using duels to settle political disputes!), but to a degree that makes many of us uncomfortable and unwilling to engage in debates with those we disagree with. Attempts to discuss improving the tone of politics in the wake of the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords foundered, in part, because they were deemed to be partisan. Accused (unfairly, I think) of having provoked the shooting by placing a crosshairs over Giffords district in her campaign literature (an unwise and unkind, if unfortunately common, political tactic), Sarah Palin declared that criticism of her political incivility was a “blood libel”… a term so emotionally charged for many Jewish Americans that she helped further polarize political debate. We can’t talk about polarization because that conversation is, you guessed it, highly polarized.
Brooke Gladstone, co-host of the indispensable radio show On the Media, introduced her listeners to a useful set of ideas for understanding why polarization makes political discourse so difficult. Trying to tackle the question, “Does NPR have a liberal bias?’, she invoked media theorist Daniel Hallin. In 1986, Hallin introduced the idea that we can understand journalistic ideas in terms of three “spheres”, widely recognized, though rarely articulated. The “sphere of consensus” includes ideas that are so widely agreed upon that they are generally uncontroversial. As Brooke puts it, “Democracy is good, slavery is bad, all men are created equal. Here truths are self-evident and journalists don’t feel the need to be objective.” Then there’s the “sphere of legitimate controversy”, issues we are used to arguing over, like taxation policy, abortion, gun control and capitol punishment, where reasonable people can disagree, and where journalists generally focus their attention. Finally, there’s the “sphere of deviance”, where ideas are deemed unworthy of a hearing. Brooke offers the “pro-pedophilia” position as an example of the deviant sphere, but we might term a discussion that questioned the wisdom of democracy or the fairness of capitalism as deviant within most American media discourse. (NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has a very thoughtful exegesis of Hallin’s spheres, if you find the idea as compelling as I do.)
The issue we face in a highly polarized media environment is that we’re no longer in agreement on the boundaries of these spheres. Hallin, interviewed by Gladstone, notes that when he offered the three sphere model, he believed there was a single set of spheres journalists agreed upon. The argument was about whether the boundaries of the spheres were set in the right places, or whether they limited legitimate debate. (One major utility of Hallin’s tool as a critical method, Rosen points out, is that anyone whose views are found within the sphere of deviance will invariably perceive the press as an enemy, as their views can’t get a hearing.)
Now we face multiple, conflicting sets of spheres. In one, the question of whether President Obama was born in the United States is within the sphere of legitimate controversy; in another, that question is in the sphere of deviance. Those who see the question as deviant are offended that the press would legitimate these ideas by giving them attention and coverage; those who see the question as a legitimate controversy are upset it receives so little attention and coverage. It’s hard to discuss a question of bias when observers are using sufficiently different definitions of consensus, deviance and controversy. NPR’s coverage may be primarily focused on the sphere of legitimate consensus for some fraction of listeners, and well into the sphere of deviance for others.
It’s worth noting that one tactic for social change involves working to shift these spheres. Perhaps to embrace the radical notions we need consider to escape Zakaria’s sclerosis, we need to shift the boundaries of the sphere of legitimate controversy and entertain notions that might have been revolutionary and deviant. But the divergence of spheres into two or more conflicting sets can make political debate frustrating. When we argue about Obama’s citizenship, one side presents what they perceive to be the relevant facts, while the other is frustrated the debate is even taking place.
I work with a number of progressive organizations that seek change in the US and around the world on topics like media reform, human rights, alternatives to incarceration and improved education. Faced with misinformation about issues they care about, either through poor reporting or the distortions of political opponents, most organizations conclude that what’s needed is more facts. The solution might be better reporting (Pro Publica), impartial factchecking (Factcheck.org) or the naming and shaming of those who knowingly spread falsehoods (Media Matters for America). While I strongly support the first two (and think the third works better when it’s less partisan and more funny), I don’t think facts will fix the problems we face from polarization.
A 2008 study by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that a belief that global warming was caused by human activity was closely correlated to political affiliation: 58% of Democrats believed human activity was causing global warming while only 27% of Republicans did. Democrats with more education were more likely to connect climate change to human activity – 75% of Democrats with college degrees see a connection, while only 52% of Democrats with less education do. The opposite is true with Republicans – the Pew report states, “Only 19% of Republican college graduates say that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming and it is caused by human activity, while 31% of Republicans with less education say the same.”
In general, more education – and, presumably, a better set of intellectual tools to seek out facts – correlates to a stronger belief in human factors leading to climate change. But once we separate survey respondents by ideology, the picture is more complicated. More education – more facts, perhaps – leads to polarization, not to persuasion. (I found this finding very helpful in understanding one of the most fascinating and baffling stories I’ve recently heard on This American Life. Wondering whether exposure to scientific research, carefully explained, could change the mind of a climate change skeptic, Ira Glass arranged a radio conversation between Dr. Roberta Johnson, the Executive Director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and a very smart teenage Glenn Beck fan. At the end of twenty minutes of what sounded to me like very persuasive arguments, the young woman explained that she wasn’t convinced – she wanted to hear both sides of the controversy, not the “argument” the earth science teacher was offering.)
A truly excellent article by Chris Mooney titled “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe in Science” offers some hope for deciphering this conundrum. Offering a tour of research in neuroscience and cognitive science, Mooney makes the case that our reasoning is heavily rooted in emotion and in our values. Phenomena like confirmation bias (a tendency to overweight information that agrees with our preconceptions) and disconfirmation bias (the tendency to discount information we disagree with) contribute to a pattern of “motivated reasoning”, where our emotions distort and shape our “rational” thinking. Mooney suggests that there’s deep neurological reasons for this behavior – we literally have a hair-trigger “fight or flight” reaction to types of information that challenge our belief systems.
As a result, confronting a highly polarized argument with facts frequently backfires. Presented with more information, Democrats find more reasons to support a conclusion that climate change has human causes, while Republicans find reasons to believe the opposite. (To Mooney’s credit, he doesn’t present climate change as his sole example of motivated reasoning, implicitly making a case that Republicans are more susceptible than Democrats – he uses the discredited autism/vaccines link as an example of a case of motivated reasoning that appears to disproportionately affect people on the left.)
While Mooney’s analysis (which I have to assume is the precursor to a book on this topic, which I suspect will be excellent) offers deep links into the scientific literature to understand the dimensions and implications of motivated reasoning, he doesn’t offer much detail for the activist seeking to persuade an opponent, or a citizen simply hoping for more civil, reasoned debate. But the closing words of his article offer a possible path forward: “You don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values — so as to give the facts a fighting chance.”
It’s possible to read this advice from Mooney as an invitation to pick up a well-thumbed copy of George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant.” Lakoff is right to point out that Republicans have often been better than Democrats at presenting their ideas in a way that appeals to moral frames. But his works focus so heavily on the language used rather than the underlying values that it’s easy to oversimplify his idea to a game of choosing the right words to persuade a different audience. When progressive activists try to go down this path, they study the language of right-wing punditry and conclude that we need our own media, including blowhard radio hosts and a left-wing Fox News. This strategy hasn’t worked very well – these outlets don’t mobilize the progressive base, nor do they convince opponents. (And they make most most progressives feel slightly icky.)
Taking the challenge Mooney presents of leading with values to give the facts a chance requires more than sprinkling business-friendly or family values fairy dust on progressive policies in the hopes that they’ll suddenly appear palatable. It requires the much harder work of understanding the values a conservative voter brings to the table and finding common ground between our issues and their values. It may mean seeking common ground on energy policy by exploring the ways in which wind turbines help farmers in the mountain West create an alternative revenue stream for their ranches, or seeking a reexamination of mandatory drug sentences laws based on a desire to cut state spending by trimming prison budgets.
Richard Cizik’s vision of “creation care“, a vision of environmentalism rooted in scriptural interpretation is more than a frame designed to persuade Evangelical Christians to take green issues seriously. Creation care isn’t “spin” created by a progressive thinktank designed to broaden the green movement’s base. It’s the result of the long, complex process of an influential Evangelical thinker wrestling with the factual evidence that suggests a human role in climate change and biblical injunctions to humans to act as stewards of God’s creation. And because Reverend Cizik is deeply rooted in the evangelical community, he’s able to find common ground, shared values and, eventually, new language that a secular environmentalist would have trouble utilizing in a way that didn’t ring false.
If the path that leads from polarization towards common ground is rooted in understanding values as well as facts, we’ve got a challenge – how do we start listening to the needs, wants and aspirations of people who view the world differently?
I think David Simon, the creator of the remarkable TV drama The Wire may have an answer. In an interview with Bill Moyers, he talks about the frustration he felt as a reporter with the Baltimore Sun, trying to get readers – and fellow newspaper writers – to understand how damaging the “war on drugs” was to their city. “And I would think, ‘Man, it’s just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts.’ When you tell a story with characters, people jump out of their seats, and part of that’s the delivery system of television.”
The power of The Wire, a series with Dickensian intricacy and an emotional punch that makes it both hard to watch and hard to stop watching, doesn’t come from seeing ourselves in the characters on the screen. I’m as committed to the notion of a universal recognition of humanity as the next progressive (or next Evangelical, for that matter), but that’s not what makes Omar Little, the gay stick-up man who only robs drug dealers so unforgettable. He’s a rich, textured character, carefully crafted, with aspirations, dreams and values which we likely don’t share, but which Simon allows us to understand. Simon’s story helps us understand that many people believe that the US is creating a new caste system through a failed war on drugs… and that they may have a point.
As with questions of framing, narrative is harder than it looks. The Wire is being taught at prestigious US universities not just because it brings complex narrative to contemporary social issues. David Simon is a genius – the folks at the MacArthur Foundation say so – and most attempts to marry narrative and social criticism aren’t nearly as compelling. That’s a reason to study and learn from his success, not to reject the power of the method.
We can stumble in other ways with narrative, especially when we blur reality and fiction, as Greg Mortenson’s recent fall from grace suggests. Mortenson’s apparent need to embellish his actual good deeds with compelling storylines is a reminder that narratives are so powerful, we can reshape our memories through the stories we tell about what we’ve seen and done. And while an audience is willing to accept that a well-crafted fiction may more compelling that the reporting of facts, we’re unwilling to forgive the blurring of the two genres.
Is America on the wrong track? Are things getting better or worse? Has our political culture become so toxic that compromise is no longer possible? These aren’t questions we can answer through marshaling collections of facts. They’re questions that force us to tell stories about our values, to listen to the stories our fellow citizens are telling, and to seek the elusive common ground that allows us to have a functional society.
A few days ago, the folks at Global Voices got email from a friend of ours who was working at the National Science Foundation. He was trying to read an article that Jacob Applebaum had posted to Global Voices Advocacy, reacting to a recent report by Freedom House evaluating various tools useful for circumventing internet censorship. When he attempted to follow the link to our site, the web filtering software used by the National Science Foundation blocked the webpage, returning him the message, “Important Notice – National Science Foundation has blocked access to this site. (policy_denied)”. The message went on to offer an email address where a user could report an erroneous blockage and request a review.
So Ivan Sigal, our executive director, wrote a note to the email address asking why our site was blocked to researchers at the National Science Foundation. We got the response back today, six days later. The response tells us that the blockage is not in error. Blue Coat, who manage web filtering for the NSF, explained that while our site is primarily classified as “political/activism”, there’s still a problem: “The website has verbiage indicating how to avoid proxy filtering, which clearly violates our security policy and therefore will remain blocked.”
That’s certainly true – one of the main functions of Global Voices Advocacy is to provide information to people in repressive nations so they can seek and publish information freely online. And it’s certainly possible that you could learn enough from Global Voices Advocacy that you could download circumvention software (not at the NSF, one presumes, but remotely), load it onto a USB key and circumvent Blue Coat’s software. One popular package you might try is Tor, funded in part by the US government, which recognizes its utility in promoting “internet freedom” for political dissidents.
In other words, the National Science Foundation is spending taxpayer money to (ineffectively) prevent scientists from learning about a debate about “internet freedom” tools the US State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors are spending taxpayer money to support and promote, again using taxpayer money.
Is there a Federal irony department where I can lodge a complaint?
I see Blue Coat’s logic, I suppose – it’s hard to maintain a filtering system if users are able to obtain tools that can circumvent those filters. (Again, I feel pretty confident that people smart enough to work at the National Science Foundation can find ways to defeat filters using software they downloaded at home.) But blocking sites for discussing filtering systems (we’re not offering downloadable software at Global Voices Advocacy) raises an interesting dilemma – can anyone at the NSF study internet filtering and circumvention if their internal IT systems have a policy on blocking access to such information? (It also raises the question of why Blue Coat doesn’t just block the page they find troubling, rather than blocking all sorts of content on our site about imprisoned activists and censorship in other nations…)
My friend Sami ben Gharbia – coincidently, the director of Global Voices Advocacy – wrote a ferocious (and very compelling) critique of the US government’s Internet Freedom agenda, suggesting that the policy has an inconsistent focus, overfocusing on countries the US sees as a threat and underfocusing on “friendly” dictatorships. He worried that this apparent inconsistency would lead to skepticism that the US really wants a free and open internet everywhere.
That skepticism is evidently warranted. I’m pretty surprised to learn that the scientists at NSF are working in a filtered internet environment, and that the filtering is so aggressive that discussion of internet filtering and circumvention can’t be discussed. One wonders whether the State Department might consider offering some trainings for the National Science Foundation so that employees there can learn side by side with Chinese dissidents how to overcome filtering and learn about State Department sponsored research on internet filtering. Maybe we can sneak into the building with Tor on USB keys and clandestinely smuggle them to oppressed US scientists.
If you work on a US government computer, I’d love to know whether you can reach Global Voices Advocacy. If you can’t, I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me know in the comments, with an error message, if possible. I promise not to publish email or IP addresses, but if you’re really worried about protecting your privacy, I do recommend using Tor. :-)
Hugo Van Vuuren, Berkman Fellow and graduate student at Harvard’s Graduate School for Design and Gregg Elliott, researcher at MIT’s Media Lab, tell us that we’re experiencing a global communications “crisis”, one that we can address through better communications protocols.
Hugo sets the stage at today’s Berkman Center lunch talk, showing us the beginning of this video from design firm JESS3:
JESS3™ / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
He summarizes the crisis, as he sees it, with a quote from Swiss designer Tina Roth Eisenberg: “Too many channels. Too many messages. Too much noise. Too much guilt.”
Lots of people are trying to build tools to cope with this flood of information. (Google’s priority inbox is one possible example of a tool to manage an overload of messages.) There’s less effort focused on overcoming the guilt. When we see people talking about reaching “inbox zero” or declaring “email bankruptcy“, they are looking for ways to deal with the guilt.
Even in an age of social media, mail and phone contact are massive in relation to new forms of communication. Russell Munroe’s legendary Online Communities map from 2005 has been updated for 2010, showing that massive social networks like Facebook are dwarfed by SMS, phonecalls and email.
Some recent articles in the New York Times – “Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You“, “Keep Your Thumbs Still When I’m Talking to You” – suggest that we’re seeing a conflict in cultural norms. Some people (me, for one) don’t answer the phone except for scheduled phonecalls, which is deeply confusing for people who consider phones the primary way to contact people. Some people check mobile phones while carrying on conversations, which can feel extremely rude to people who focus on face to face contact. Hugo points out that there can be differences in community protocol from one side of a university to others: “The Media Lab is much more of a phone-centered place than the GSD. At the GSD, email is something you do at your desk…”
We’re starting to see the explicit emergence of communications protocols. danah boyd‘s “email sabbatical” involves discarding all email received during a vacation – if you want to reach her, her autoresponder tells you, email her again once she’s come home. Tim Berners-Lee’s home page includes a complex protocol about what you should and should not email him. Harvard CS professor Harry Lewis suggested to Hugo that one of the massive problems in organizing a conference is figuring out how to contact academics, who tend to hide between different media, letting some emails go to administrative assistants while “real”, direct email addresses are carefully preserved commodities.
Hugo shows five.sentenc.es, an intriguing attempt to simplify email conversations by declaring that emails will be answered in five sentences or less. The hope is, by declaring a different protocol, it will no longer be considered rude to answer emails compactly and succintly. But this is “a kernel, not a generalized idea” for communications, Hugo offers. We need something broader and more inclusive.
One option is “stop and go signaling”, which we see on tools like instant messenger. But these status messages, which Greg explains used to be expressive, much like Facebook status messages, have turned into their own sort of protocol. “Away usually means that you’re at your keyboard, but busy.” It’s a step in the right direction, but perhaps too limited a vocabulary.
Hugo shows us a code of manners presented by the “Children’s National Guild of Courtesy”, a British organization from early last century. There are no single norms for behavior these days, set by institutions like this one. Norms are now set by individuals, or illustrated by example for leaders within communities.
To address these issues, Greg suggests that we need to:
- Define our rules of engagement
- Organize a system to execute on those rules, and
- Share your rules and expectations
Protocol.by is a first pass at defining and sharing these rules of engagement. Coming out of a closed alpha test shortly, it lets you register an account and compactly state the ways in which you’d prefer to be contacted. Greg explains that he dislikes spontaneous phonecalls – his protocol tells people not to call him before noon, and not to expect an answer to unscheduled calls. For emails, he urges correspondents to avoid polite niceties and get to the point. For people unsure of how to contact him, these protocols can make it easier for people to contact him in a way that’s minimally intrusive and maximally effective. (I have a protocol, if you’re interested…)
The goal for the site, Hugo offers, is for the site to become a “social anchor” to help bridge across multiple identities and online presences. In the long term, it could plug into location-based services and offer richer, more targeted information on how to contact people politely. A group could use protocol.by with voting systems which could help group protocols emerge.
Going forward, protocol.by might offer suggested protocols based on your identity – if you’re a technophile, you might want to be contacted with email and IM, not phone, for instance. Over time, these might emerge as a small set of cultural norms, rather than purely personal norms.
There’s dozens of questions from the Berkman crowd, as well as many observations phrased as questions. Some of the highlights, to the best of my reporting ability:
Q: Is there a revenue model for protocol.by?
A: Not at present – it’s a research project. In the long run, there might be fun ways to use the data, perhaps the way OKCupid analyzes dating information, in a way that might have financial value.
Q: Protocol-free communication leaves a lot of ambiguity in communications, which can be a good thing. Is someone not answering their email because you contacted them the wrong way, or because they don’t want to talk to you. Is it such a good idea to squeeze out this ambiguity?
A: You’ve got a good degree of freedom with the tool in how explicit you want to be. If you offer promises – “Emails will be answered within 48 hours” – you eliminate ambiguity. But a prioritized list of communication protocols is still pretty ambiguous.
Q: This system is very elegant, but it doesn’t recognize that you might communicate differently with a babysitter calling you about an emergency and an undergrad asking to interview you for a paper. How does the system handle this?
A: Protocols will likely differ for complete strangers versus friends and family. Protocol.by is mostly for people outside your circle of trust.
Q (David Weinberger): How many users do you need for this to be an effective research project and how will you get them?
A: There are about 500 users thus far. Having a few thousand may let us run bigger experiments. We’ll get more by embedding the tool into webpages and social networks.
Q (David Abrahms): I might want to be contacted via phone, but if I’m in Beijing, I’d like the system to accomodate that.
A: Great idea.
Q: (David Weinberger) There’s certainly a need for more metadata about your norms when you communicate with people outside your community. We need it for IP issues as well – Creative Commons helps us communicate what you can do with your content. Maybe this is a model for getting people to adopt this protocol?
A: Figuring out how to embed this well is going to help us work through these issues.
I was at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD yesterday, at the Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference, a remarkable institution that I confess I knew nothing about before accepting an invitation to speak here. For 51 years, the Academy has opened its doors to students from the other service academies, political science students from non-military institutions, and to military cadets from other countries for annual discussions about foreign policy and international affairs. The conference is organized primarily by the naval midshipmen and it’s one of the best-run academic conferences I’ve attended. I had the great pleasure of delivering the opening keynote for the conference Tuesday morning – I’ll try to post those notes later this week – and these notes reflect my liveblogging from the audience of a very interesting conversation.
Evgeny Morozov has emerged as one of the leading critics of the idea that the internet is a useful tool for social change, suggesting in his provocative book “The Net Delusion” that the internet can be more useful for dictators than for activists. He’s found himself answering some sharp questions in the wake of the Arab Spring protests, which appear to have used social media quite productively in changing governments in Tunisia and Egypt. One of the leading commentators who’s tried to unpack what effect the internet has and hasn’t had in the Arab Spring is Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She’s been doing some of the most important work in unpacking theory around social networks and examining those theories about network effects in connection to events in Egypt and Tunisia.
Their conversation is moderated by technology journalist Brendan Greeley. Brendan now writes for Bloomberg Businessweek, and formerly wrote on technology for the Economist, the New York Times and pretty much an all-star list of US journalism outlets. Brendan suggests that theorists about political change are no longer looking to Clausewitz, but to Star Trek for their inspiration. We’re in an age of algorithmic culture – we want to know specifically how something, like the Arab Spring protests, transpired and we care about the details of which tools, which actors and which legal jurisdictions, because these details have consequences for those who’d try to use the same methods in different circumstances. He suggests that it’s not insignificant that Zeynep and Evgeny are from outside the US (he’s from Belarus, she from Turkey), because we’re seeing a shift in media from questions about what the world thinks of America to questions about what the world thinks about itself.
Evgeny opens his remarks noting that the question, “How does the Internet affect democracy?” leads to answers that are very abstract. It’s difficult to quantify democracy. The internet is bound to have different impacts on democracy in the US, versus Thailand or Kyrgyzstan.
He notes that his views on the internet and democracy are informed by his perspective as a Belarussian – calling his home nation “the last tyranny in Europe” is an understatement. His exposure to issues surrounding the internet came through the frame of democratization. He suggests that the internet is only one of many tools available to policymakers who would like to spread democratization – they could train journalists, develop political parties, nurture civil society. “I’m not trying to bash the internet for being evil or bad… I’m focused on opportunity costs.” This leads him to ask “what we can do better, but also what are ways in which the internet could make our job of promoting democracy more challenging.”
Evgeny rejects deterministic explanations, assertions that the internet will lead to a particular outcome based on a rigid, theoretical understand of design and architecture. There’s an assumption, he argues, that because the internet runs on decentralized networks and protocols, it will lead to a decentralized political culture. This argument disregards the context, the political environments, which can differ radically country to country. Russian nationalists are taking advantage of the internet to promote their views, more than the liberals. It’s the opposite in Belarus, despite the fact that the nations share a border. The political and social effects of the internet are rooted in political and social environments. Notions like internet freedom tend to disregard the specifics of local political situation and culture.
He warns that we have a tendency to disregard adaptability of authoritarian states. We’ve tended to assume that they would either need to shut down the internet and experience severe economic consequences, or open it up: the dictator’s dilemma. This model fails to consider the ways dictators can use the internet for their own ends. They won’t use it successfully in every single situation, but we need to be open to the idea that certain features of the contemporary internet make it easier for authoritarian governments to increase control of cyberspace through surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. Governments can use DDoS as a tool for censorship. They can surveil traffic via social networks, and use the information users reveal to make maps of connections between activists. This isn’t to say that the dictators are bound to win – instead, his goal is to make policymakers alert to the ways in which the internet is used to surpress democracy.
Who wins – the activists or the dictators – won’t be clear for decades to come, he asserts. It’s a mistake to argue that you can’t achieve anything useful towards a democracy agenda on Facebook. There are useful things the Internet can deliver. But if we take the long-term view, we need to ask what services like Facebook are doing to our political culture. The solution to the problem of dictatorship in Belarus is not to create an online opposition that’s separate from the existing opposition. Online activists deface pictures of the president and publish them online – it can be funny, and maybe it’s building a culture of resistance. But these developments seem to be separate from the offline, mainstream political organizations working for change in Belarus. And ultimately, he believe change will come from the streets, not from online.
In the Middle East, we’re lucky that people weren’t just turning their Twitter avatars green or joining Facebook groups. We don’t need to give credit to Facebook for bringing people into the streets. Online activism can be effective, he argues, but we need to find ways to ensure it happens in conjunction with offline politics. We don’t want to turn the internet into a ghetto where the youth blow off steam, which makes the government happy, as it’s not leading to real change. Our challenge is to design policies that connect the internet to more substantive political change, bridging between these two worlds.
Brendan points out that Evgeny was one of the first thinkers to challenge the idea that the most important controls to online speech were technical. What does it mean that key blocks to discourse are social as well as technical?
Evgeny suggests that, in the Middle East, there’s very little tolerance from governments for alternative opinions expressed online. In China and Russia, there’s more of an attempt to defend and shape positions online. Bloggers in China paid by the government try to legitimate the government’s positions. In some countries, the government is trying to limit the utility of tools like Facebook by infiltrating groups used by the opposition. One tactic is to join those groups, upload pornographic content then report the group and get it banned. Attacks that make a website unavailable, even for a few days at a time, will over time break down the communities that would develop around those tools.
Brendan mentions that Evgeny considers himself a reformed cyberutopian. What was his conversion experience?
Earlier in his career, Evgeny explains, he worked for an eastern European NGO that worked for political change through the internet. His work as an internet evangelist helped him understand how well-intentioned projects can cause more harm than good. US government projects come into countries like Belarus, hired the local talent, distorted the economy and had little impact on real political change. He began systematically doubting the NGO mindset. So much attention was being paid to the Chinese firewall, and not enough attention to how governments were controlling online space through creating entertainment content to distract from political content.
Zeynep introduces herself as a former software developer, “a lifetime ago”. She paid her way through college taking care of legacy technical systems. In the 1990s in Turkey, there were a lot of technology managers who didn’t understand how these things worked. She tells the story of a boss who came to her and asked “Can it tell if I’m lying?”, pointing to the computer in the corner. She gave him the irresistible answer: “Yes.” People who look inside the black box, she explains, don’t ask these questions – people who don’t understand them do.
As a careful academic, Zeynep explains, she’s reluctant to make broad generalizations about what kind of world we might be living in one or two decades from now. But she promises to put some of that nuance aside and offer more forceful predictions than she might in a peer-reviewed paper.
The first of these predictions is that we’re now likely looking at a world where promiting other people’s democracy is no longer on the agenda – they’re promoting their own agenda. She references a tweet a friend posted from Cairo: “The people in Tahrir Square greet themselves as liberators.” The question of how best to promote democracy may be an archaic question. Instead, we may need to focus on understanding the changing media ecology and the ways in which it’s changing social relationships.
Zeynep mentions that she was reviewing a pre-released copy of Evgeny’s book in November, when Wikileaks became a dominant news story. The argument in the first half of his book about the US State Department’s enthusiasm for the internet looked less germane now that the State Department seemed to be having second thoughts about the utility of the internet when used by leakers of government documents. The second half of the book is about dictators using the internet, and then Tunisia and Egypt dominated the news agenda. She wonders whether this was the best timing an author’s ever experienced.
Responding to the core argument in Evgeny’s book, Zeynep wonders whether the analogy of the printing press is a helpful one. The first two major uses for the printing press were printing bibles and dispensations and indulgences. One might have assumed that the new technology would empower the Catholic church. But a technology that threatened the monopoly on the written word threatened those monopolists, in the long term.
She suggests that we’re seeing two major changes brought about by internet adoption. First, the shape of our connectivity networks is changing. There are two major types of networks in modern, mass-media societies. There’s a person to person social network, and the one to many network of broadcast media. What’s emerging now is many to many connectivity, which lets people talk to each other in ways that didn’t exist previously. There were some ways in the past that individuals could spread ideas to a mass of people, but they were much more difficult and much smaller in scale than the tools we’re exploring now.
Second, the speed of information diffusion has implications for the efficacy of protest movements. The recent Koran burning in Florida led, as we all know, to riots in Afghanistan. But it took four days from the burning to the riots. In part, this is because fewer than 1% of all Afghans are online. The protests didn’t break out until President Karzai condemned the Florida pastor’s actions on television.
Zeynep tells us that there’s reason to think that the rapid spread of information via social media could be changing political outcomes in the Middle East. In Tunisia in 2008, corruption around an exam designed to hire mining engineers led to a massive trade union protest. The Ben Ali government engaged in one of their favorite tactics: “Whack-A-Protest”. They surrounded the town, kicked out the journalists and arrested the trade unionists. Some women and children remained protesting, but it’s very hard to sustain a protest without attention, support or a sense that your actions could lead to change. The protest fizzled out, just as the Ben Ali regime had planned.
At that time, Zeynep reminds us, fewer that 28,000 Tunisians were on Facebook. Two years later, the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi triggered protests in Sidi Bouzid and a near-identical response from the Ben Ali government. But Tunisia had 2 million Facebook users by January of 2011, and cellphone video cameras were pervasive. While no journalists were allowed into Sidi Bouzid, citizen media was able to document the protests, and disseminate their reporting to activist networks that had been working to challenge the regime. Those networks were able to disseminate the information before Whack-A-Protest was successful. States are resource-constrained actors, Zeynep continues. When protests spread rapidly through social media, they may not be able to react in time.
The effectiveness of a government crackdown has a great deal to do with whether a regime can rely on any support from citizens, or whether they are universally despised. By the end of his reign, Mubaak was so unpopular, he couldn’t even pay people to say positive things about him. It’s different in Bahrain or Syria, she posits, where regimes have more indigenous support. In a situation where there is unity against a dictator, social media may sweep away a dictator. In a polarized society, social media might lead to increased tensions. Social media doesn’t lead inexorably to democracy – it does lead to participation, which can be divisive in an already divided society.
She ends her opening remarks with a direct critique of Evgeny’s analysis, which she sees as making an unhelpful contrast between online and offline activism. “Talk to anyone who’s engaged in activism and they see one, integrated online and offline world, not separate spaces.”
Brendan acknowledges that a particular media narrative has emerged around Evgeny’s book: “It was cyberutopians versus Evgeny. Several revolutions later, Evgeny is wrong.” It’s rare that academics get a test case like the Arab Spring – what have we learned and what’s been a surprise since January 1?
Evgeny tells us that he wasn’t surprised that the internet was used by social movements. He argues that Zeynep is misinterpreting his distinction between online and offline activism. “In certain cases, we do see isolated groups of young kids who are acting online only, with no integration into social movements. This doesn’t mean social movements shouldn’t use online media.” But celebration of online media may give too much hope to people who believe change can come purely through the internet, and that would be a sad thing to do. Returning to Brendan’s question, he notes that the revolutions were surprising geopolitically, not technologically. “It’s an overly deterministic mindset to conclude that the internet favors dictators or activists.”
Brendan pushes further, asking whether Evgeny was surprised that Tunisia, which has displayed high levels of technical sophistication in censoring the internet, was unwilling or unable to control the internet in the face of protests. Evgeny argues that technological sophistication doesn’t determine political outcomes. He explains that he was surprised that Egypt’s government didn’t attack the Khaled Said Facebook group, noting that Chinese or Russian authorities might have. But his general argument is that technology is a less effective sphere of analysis than analyzing politics and economics.
Zeynep notes that she had just offered an example where similar protests in Tunisia were crushed in 2008 and succeeded in 2010. That example doesn’t deny that the revolution was a people’s movement, but it does suggest that technology was a factor. Evgeny retorts that it’s unreasonable to pick an anecdote and make the broader argument that technology was a key factor. Zeynep clarifies: she’s not arguing that technology is sufficient to lead to change, but it is a significant factor. In Egypt, activists have been developing online skills since 2005. Tunisian activists have developed great unity around the topic of anti-censorship. In both cases, we’ve seen the development of a digital public sphere that’s had an influence in recent events.
She explains that her surprise in 2011 is that people continue to refer to Iran’s Green Revolution as a failure. For people in the middle east, she argues, the Green Revolution was an “aha” moment. People could portray their dissent to the rest of the world. The movement was crushed, but it continues to be an inspiration.
Brendan suggests that the debate has shifted from whether the internet can have an effect on democracy to whether we can generalize those effects or whether we have to consider each country as a separate case. Are there generalizations that are safe to make?
Evgeny argues that we can generalize that there’s a reduced cost of access to information and reduced coordination costs. But this doesn’t inherently lead to democratization. States are getting better at creating “a semi-governed digital public sphere.” In these states, the “independent media” is state controlled, NGOs are really GONGOs (Government-owned NGOs). It’s not unreasonable to believe that they’ll be able to extend the concept of a “sovereign managed democracy”, a phrase used in Russia, using a variety of techniques, some borrowed from western advertising agencies, “to control the post-Habermas public sphere.”
Zeynep suggests that we can generalize that the internet increases participation, but not necessarily democracy. The values people bring to the table govern whether that participation is democratic or not. She suggests that control of democratic institutions via advertising and media doesn’t just happen in China – it happens in the US as well. China is able to get away with controlling a public sphere because it can stand on amazing economic growth and on passionate nationalism. “If those faltered, I think they will find level of censorship is not sustainable in the face of collective action.”
The dictator’s dilemma, she argues, is about the intensity and the unity of dissent. In a divided society with some legitimacy to a government, you can get away with some silencing of dissent, even if it causes damage to some commercial interests. In an autocracy that’s almost in complete opposition to the populus, it’s much harder to get away with. The era of the autocrat who is almost universally despised is over, she says, perhaps not today but in the near future. This has real implications for US foreign policy. The US has had a corrupt bargain with autocrats. It’s brought us neither democracy or stability, and we won’t be able to return to that bargain/
Evgeny suggests that Zeynep’s view is internet-centric. He agrees that the era of the dictator is over, but suggests that this isn’t due to technology, but due to discourses of human rights, the rise of globalization and other factors. He suggests her example of the printing press – talking about the printing press and not about Martin Luther – was technocentric.
“There were two workshops to train bloggers in Cairo in 2009, one supported by the US government.” Perhaps they deserve some of the credit for the Egyptian revolution. We need to pay attention to these training efforts, not just to the technology. And we need to recognize activists who don’t use technology. He offers the story of Alaa Abdel Fatteh, a celebrated young activist who’s active both online and offline. Evgeny notes that his parents are seasoned Egyptian dissidents. “Alaa spent five weeks in jail, his father spent five years,” but Alaa got more attention because he’s a blogger. “This doesn’t mean that cyberactivism is not important, but that we tend to fetishize it.”
At this point, I had to duck out and join a conference call – I’m sorry to have missed questions from the audience.
I was grateful for the chance to hear these two thinkers engage in a debate, though I feel like the points of disagreement in this discussion were harder to identify than in Zeynep’s review of Evgeny’s book. I think Evgeny’s presentation of his arguments has become softer and more careful in the wake of recent events than it was in his book. While I don’t think the Arab Spring invalidates all of Evgeny’s points – I agree strongly with his critique of technocentrism – I think it’s harder to make the case that technology is likely to favor dictators over activists. Evgeny has wisely shifted and now argues that technology doesn’t necessarily favor dictators or democrats and that we need to consider both options. That’s a wiser stance, in my opinion, but perhaps one less likely to draw the widespread attention some of his more confident assertions have garnered.
I thought Zeynep’s analysis regarding participation was extremely helpful. In a case like Egypt, where there was little support (at least in online circles) for Mubarak, a participatory space quickly became an activist space. In Bahrain, where there’s support and opposition to the government online, participation may be increasing polarization and conflict. I’ll be fascinated to see whether her argument that “speed is different” holds up – will governments be able to catch up and play Whack-a-Mole against new, network enabled protests? The Arab Spring may give us one set of test cases, and recent Chinese crackdowns on online dissent, another set.
One way or another, it was great to see three smart folks onstage trying to work through these issues. Thanks to NAFAC for making it happen.
My Heart's In Accra by Ethan Zuckerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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