[p2p-research] Digital Power and Its Discontents: An Edge Conversation with Morozov & Shirky

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Digital Power and Its
Discontents: An Edge Conversation with Morozov & Shirky via
3quarksdaily by Robin Varghese on 4/13/10
In Edge:
CLAY SHIRKY: Evgeny, I think this may be a frustrating hour, because I
think you and I disagree with each other less than you disagree with a
lot of the people you're calling internet utopians. For instance, you
recently picked on the John Perry Barlow piece A Declaration of the
Rights of Cyberspace, which is so over-the-top Libertarian, and which
presents cyberspace as a separate sphere unconnected to the rest of the
planet, that it didn't really have much effect on practical matters
like foreign policy.

EVGENY MOROZOV: I guess we're talking about a recent essay of mine that
appeared in Wall Street Journal in February. It was published a week
after yet another overhyped wave of Iranian protests came to nothing.
But this time something was different in how that failure was explained
in the media. Suddenly, I could sense some public frustration — even in
The New York Times — about how the Internet could have actually
thwarted the protests, making them more disorganized. That's something
I really wanted to play with in that essay. But since the Wall Street
Journal wanted me to offer a critique of techno-utopianianism, I had to
venture beyond recent events and see what kind of ideas are guiding
governments in this space. Thus, the real objective was not to pick on
John Perry Barlow — who in 1996 wrote "A Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace" — which is one of the seminal texts of
cyber-libertarianism, or any of the other early thinkers. It was more
to reveal that we are currently facing a huge intellectual void with
the regards to the Internet's impact on global politics.

But the lack of a coherent framework does not really prevent us from
embracing the power of the Internet. There is certainly a lot of
excitement within governments — both democratic and authoritarian ones
— about using the Internet to advance their political agendas, both at
home and abroad. The kind of assumptions that politicians need in order
to decide their policies all have to come from somewhere. And much of
what has been said about the Internet in the past seems intellectually
invalid today. Still, most of the assumptions made by politicians seem
to be rooted in early cyber-libertarian discourses about the Internet
and politics. A lot of those early discourses took shape in particular
(and very different) contexts. If you look at John Perry Barlow's
declaration, it was produced in the context of attempts to regulate the
Internet in America, in 1996. It had nothing to do with Iran and only
very little with the world outside of the US. We do need a new theory
to guide us through all of this, for old theories are no good.

SHIRKY: Yes, I agree with that, and with regard to Declaration of the
Rights of Cyberspace — ten years ago I was teaching that at NYU classes
as an example of sloppy political thinking, so I think we've known that
those theories were no good for a while now.

You end your Journal essay with a fairly evocative paragraph
saying, "The State Department can't abandon ideas of trying to harness
the Internet for democracy, but it should come up with a policy that's
more in line with what's possible, or what works."




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