uncomputing

sometimes, the truth is just out there.

i’ve been learning a lot from evgeny morozov for a while and i’d like to think that his work fits with a slightly disturbing clarity with my recent  book the cultural logic of computation and the recent work of a number of other second (third?) wave digital theorists (eg christian fuchs, matthew hindman) suggesting that we are in need of some very rapid rethinking of our attitudes toward “the digital” per se.

i don’t care whether he wrote he wrote the lyrics to my favorite grateful dead song (for which he once used to be much more famous than for his cyberpolitical views)–i know exactly what politics jpb (and, for most of his life, bob weir too) represent. it’s not even jpb’s radical libertarianism–it’s the part of his belief-system that fits into the the same neoliberal agenda common to hilary clinton and google (and to which our alternative is china?).

today there’s an article by morozov in the wall street journal titled the digital dictatorship with the subtitle: “it’s fashionable to hold up the internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom. evgeny morozov on the myth of the techno-utopia.”

With regard to Iran, morovzov notes, for example, that

one can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

and

The excessive attention that many Western observers devoted to the role of the Internet in the Iranian protests also reveals another, more serious impact that techno-utopianism has on how we think about the Internet in an authoritarian context. Unable to transcend the hackneyed framework of post-electoral protest, we are becoming blind to more general changes and effects that the Internet has on authoritarian societies in between elections.

a main point of morozov’s analysis is that there is no twitter revolution, something on which i’ve been insisting since anyone even made the absurd suggestion, but which apparently still needs to be shown conclusively (and yet will continue to be asserted, or i suppose may not until there actually is a g***** revolution in iran–btw, is it clear that a revolution is the right thing to want in iran? the last one didn’t turn out so well, and we in the us don’t have such clean hands there either. anyway…).

but we need to make a further point, & the one i think desperately needs to be added to the discussion: we come up with ideas like “twitter revolution” because we are orwell’s children in 1984: we are looking for ways to justify and account for the destructive and terrifying apparatus to which we have given ourselves over.

let’s face it–the number of amazingly critical issues facing our world, especially climate change, could not be more frighteningly urgent; whatever they are doing to “us,” the “instantaneous worldwide availability of every piece of knowledge” “organized for us” has not prevented the development of a know-nothing political discourse structured so tightly that one may not even mention the very political system we have been most repeatedly warned is associated with total surveillance, the one we should really be worried about (the one whose name begins with f, but which in teabag land has somehow mystically become the same system as the ones beginning with s and n, and which can only be detected via: ovens [the f/n version] or any affront to absolute corporate-capital authority [the s/f version]) and it curiously has to do with relation of corporation and state, another topic we are told not to discuss since “that government governs best which governs least,” according to a person who specifically did not mean that private corporations should be subject to that lack of rule–let alone dream of “limited liability” or “corporate person.”

while the American public is actively engaged in a rich and provocative debate about the Internet’s impact on our own society—asking how new technologies affect our privacy or how they change the way we read and think—we gloss over such subtleties when talking about the Internet’s role in authoritarian countries. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream American magazine running a cover story entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Case of China,” as the Atlantic did (without the China part) in 2008. Such attitudes almost smack of orientalism-in-reverse: While we fret about the Internet’s contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed and engaged global citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments

note that both questions, directly referencing carr’s 2008 atlantic monthly article, were part of the latest (#4 if you are counting) pew future of the internet survey, which I think still fails to ask the most pressing questions, for the most part.

to be as clear as possible: the question isn’t whether or not there’s a twitter revolution: the question is the source of the pre-emptive belief in and surveillance for a twitter revolution, especially on the part of computationalists who otherwise eschew most engagements with actual world politics.

btw, as i’ll expand on in a further piece, among the most dangerous parts of computationalist ideology is that some technology or other “enables activists to do x…” Digital technologies generally enable anyone who uses them to do x. So if something enables activists, it also enables states, corporations, and activists on sides you don’t like. I think the empirical evidence is overwhelming that the narrowcasting and personalization of current computers exacerbates divisions, rather than spreading knowledge; and I challenge anyone to honestly look at contemporary us politics and say that as a whole it is showing signs of “more open democracy.” computerized open information doesn’t even prevent know-nothingism; it certainly doesn’t make “good” revolutions of “just the kind we want” more likely.

thanks to smd

a nice retrospective of new technology in recent Iranian politics on the BBC this week was advertised on radio in triumphalist terms, evidenced in the story’s first and second sentences. follow the story to its end, though, and discover that it’s the repressive and invasive powers of computers that are most apparent, while the democratic ones remain as chancy as all other efforts at real democracy.

They called it the “Twitter revolution.” Iran’s post-election protests showed the world the power of new media to organise and publicise opposition in a controlled society.

On the anniversary of the Islamic revolution in 1979, once again Twitter, Facebook and other internet tools could be crucial in helping the opposition organise another major protest.

Since Iran’s disputed election in June of last year, the cyber war between government and opposition has taken on a whole new dimension.

“Absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented” – that was the role of the internet in Iran’s election dispute according to Hamid Dabashi, who presents an opposition webcast to Iran from New York every week.

His webcast is broadcast on YouTube, and his staff say it then goes “viral” – spread across Iran by other websites, CDs and Bluetooth links between mobile phones.

Mr Dabashi described the role of the internet in helping to organise the huge post-election demonstrations.

“Nobody called for it except on the internet,” he said.

“Cyberspace was buzzing with information that there was to be a demonstration from this square to that square. As a result if there is a leadership… it is really the networking that the internet has made possible.”

Raw power

Just over a week after the election, the footage of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, bleeding to death from bullet wounds was sent from a mobile phone and relayed around the world.

The opposition believes she was shot by one of the government’s Basij militia.

The Iranian government continues to deny responsibility, but the pictures have swayed opinion internationally.

That raw power has been noticed by governments.

The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, hosted a conference recently on it in Washington and proposed new support to try to free the internet from censorship.

The Iranian government has become far more sophisticated in its handling of the internet as well.

A day after the election, Iran closed the internet down entirely for half an hour, then slowly loosened its grip, as the authorities struggled to gain control.

“If you look at what was going on after the election, it was very clear that they had no solid plan in place,” explained Austin Heap of the Censorship Research Center in San Francisco.

“The way they were filtering, what they were filtering. Just basic things like the speed the internet was operating at would change day by day, week by week. And if you look at just the past three months their filtering attempts have become more co-ordinated and organised.”

Crude blocking

Mr Heap has been writing an anti-censorship program, Haystack, which he hopes to spread to internet users in Iran.

My experience from two years in Iran was that both sides struggled to gain the upper hand.

Any program to prevent filtering would have a limited life, as the government eventually found a way to block it.

But at the same time the filtering system was crude and ineffective.

In the turmoil that followed the election, that “mood swing” became even more dramatic.

One morning the whole BBC website would be inaccessible, and even usually secure connections were blocked.

On other days the controls would be mysteriously lifted, enabling us to use the internet to broadcast live from our office in Tehran.

Now Iran says it has organized a new “cyber army” with a more sophisticated approach.

Supporters tracked

According to experts I spoke to in the United States, the Revolutionary Guards have drafted, sometimes against their will, some of Iran’s bright young internet-savvy generation.

Not only are they helping to block opposition communications and track down opposition supporters from their use of the web, they have taken the battle to the enemy.

The cyber army claimed responsibility recently for what Mr Heap said was a well co-ordinated attack on Twitter and other websites.

“The attacks were very well organised,” he told me.

“They had back-up plans and back-up back-up plans, all of which got enacted. It was clear with the timing and the co-ordination that people had planned this ahead and were trying to make a statement.”

The battle for control of the web is carried out between governments and individuals.

Each new censorship tool used by Iran or other authoritarian countries is taken up as a challenge by many thousands of young computer experts around the world.

It is a game of cat and mouse, likely to change the face of the internet for the indefinite future.

Cyber battle has become cyber war, and there is no sign of a ceasefire.

First published on Harvard University Press blog, Jun 24 2009.

Few words have been heard more often lately than revolution. The word occurs in two ways, but the connection between them is at best fuzzy. First, commentators wonder if Iran is going through a political revolution. Second, they speculate about an “internet revolution”—not merely a change in communications technologies, but something more significant for democracy, for political organization.

Jeff Jarvis calls it “the API revolution” (referring to the ability, via software called an API, to for third-parties to “use” other applications—for mobile phone providers, for example, to route messages onto Twitter). Clay Shirky calls it “the big one”:

… this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.

When Shirky said this it was still plausible that the revolution in Iran would “take.” It didn’t. And what Shirky says about the benefits of “the big one” are odd: “people … are engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on messages to their friends.” I am absolutely positive that these have been critical aspects of every political revolution, regardless of technology. So what does Twitter change? “The whole world is watching.” Well, we outside Iran can watch in much more detail than we could before. But since when is external observation an important part of revolution? It can help. But “we” have watched many failed revolutions from the outside. Does “our” knowing more of the details of the failure really change the situation?

At the very least, the failure of the Iranian revolution shows that the thesis that “network openness” leads automatically or directly to democracy is false—we have plenty of network openness, we keep celebrating it, and yet all we saw in practice was a near-revolution very similar to hundreds we have seen in the past. Other than the evidence we see on computer screens—other than the Twitter feeds and Neda YouTube videos—what actually changed in the process of or progress toward revolution in any substantive fashion?

The point I hope to make here, and one that I make at greater length in my book The Cultural Logic of Computation, is that so many of our commentators appear to live in a world where the equation between positive political change and network openness, or technological evolution, is so obvious as to be transparent. The hidden and most dangerous underside of this is that the only politics such people want most to examine are the liberatory potentials they have already decided are there.

As Chris Rhoads and Loretta Chao discuss in an article this week in the Wall Street Journal, though—raising issues that are well known to those of us who pay close attention to what governments and businesses do with computer networks—the fact is that the Iranian government is using the network to surveil its citizens, to anticipate their plans, to identify dissidents, and to counter them. In an interview on NPR, Rhoads explained what seems never to occur to the techno-evangelists: Iran has kept the internet open because it provides them with much richer information to spy on its citizens.

I am not suggesting and not hoping that we see a new generation of Clay Shirkys and Jeff Jarvises who blog exclusively about the advent of a new, real Big Brother. But there is a reason that it was a former Bush national security advisor who suggested, amidst the revolution-that-failed, that the Twitter developers deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, when in fact Twitter is being used to control and monitor dissidence. We have to find a way to explore in a sober way the political consequences of all parts of the computerization of the world, whether they fit or do not fit with our own hopes, and even to resist those parts of computerization that ultimately do not serve democratic ends.