Morozov’s book focuses on his ideas of cyber-utopianism and Internet centrisim. He defines cyber-utopianism, as a “naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication.” Internet centrisim is a “philosophy of action that informs how decisions, including those that deal with democracy promotion, are made and how long-term strategies are created.” This idea encourages Internet-centrists to consider the political environment of the situation involved, instead of just blindly applying the Internet as a tool for democratic change regardless of the context.
Many attempts to free nations from authoritarian rule using the Internet have failed miserably. Morozov attributes this lack of success not to the medium, but to the people using the medium as if it were a mythical magic tool that will free us all from our chains. Instead, Morozov urges us to consider the context first and choose the tools and the strategies second. If we fail to do this, he promises a backlash that could actually have effects against democracy. His book encourages us not to give up on using the Internet as a tool to promote democracy, but to use it more wisely.
Morozov’s The Net Delusion could not come at a better time as the topic is particularly timely with the overthrow of Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak. His first chapter discusses how the media jumped on the Internet bandwagon during the Iranian protests of 2009, exclaiming a Twitter revolution. He details carefully how this type of media attention couple with en email sent to Twitter by the Obama administration, went a long way to undermine the protestors’ efforts and strengthen authoritarian rule in Iran and all over the world.
Morozov details how authoritarian governments began to monitor Twitter and the content of bloggers when these spaces were previously left alone. In some cases, bloggers were arrested or penalized because of their online revolutionary content. I noticed with the recent Egypt protests that the media seemed to jump on the same new media bandwagon, this time hailing Facebook as the magical tool. Fortuna
When considering the context as Morozov asks us to, it makes sense that Egypt’s revolution would have been a success where Iran’s revolution failed. The Obama administration stayed as quiet as possible through the beginnings of this protest because they considered Mubarak to be an American ally. Even though Mubarak is a dictator, there was no political reason for Obama to want him to be overthrown. In fact, Vice President Joe Biden said that Mubarak was not a dictator and should not have to resign, but should be more "responsive" to the needs of his people. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Egyptian president to implement democratic reforms, but stopped short of saying he should leave his position. In this case, there was no reason for Egypt to suspect that the U.S. was behind the revolution in order to spread Western ideals and other countries didn’t get suspicious either.
Still, Mubarak attempted to block the Internet by restricting access to many sites and considerably slowing down the network. While Twitter was unavailable, more savvy users still found a way to get around the block by using proxy servers. A quote from Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington explains this. “Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out,” he says. “It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what’s going on.” Essentially then, while technology failed the revolution in the context of an authoritarian government, it was still technology that revived it again. As this technology gets more and more advanced, and people get savvier using it, will it be harder for dictators to control? It seems like such was the case in Egypt.
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