by Al Gore
Worse still, the Iranian security forces gave the world a demonstration of what a malignant authoritarian government can do to its citizens by using the knowledge it gains from their Internet connections and social graphs to identify and track down dissenters, read their private communications, and effectively stifle any effective resistance to the dictatorship’s authority. The entire episode was a chilling alarm that underscored the extent to which the lack of privacy on the Internet can potentially increase the power of government over the governed more easily than it can empower reform and revolution.
China, in particular, has introduced by far the most sophisticated measures to censor content on the Internet and exercise control over its potential for fostering reformist or revolutionary fervor. The “Great Firewall of China” is the largest effort at Internet control in the world today. (Iran and the retro-Stalinist dictatorship of Belarus are the other two countries that have attempted such efforts.) China’s connection to the global Internet is monopolized by state-run operators that carefully follow a system of protocols that effectively turn the Internet within China into a national intranet. In 2010, even an interview with the then premier of China, Wen Jiabao, in which he advocated reforms, was censored and made unavailable to the people of China.
In 2006 the Chinese plan to control content on the Internet collided with the open values of the world’s largest search engine, Google. As one who participated in the company’s deliberations at the time, I saw firsthand how limited the options were. After searching for ways to reconcile its commitment to full openness of information with China’s determined effort to block any and all content it found objectionable, Google made the principled decision to withdraw from China and instead route its site through Hong Kong, which still maintains a higher level of freedom, albeit within constraints imposed from Beijing. Facebook, by the way, has never been allowed into China. The cofounder of Google, Sergey Brin, said in 2012 that China had been far more effective in controlling the Internet than he had expected. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle,” Brin noted, “but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle.”
The much admired Chinese artist Ai Weiwei expressed a different view: “[China] can’t live with the consequences of that.… It’s hopeless to try to control the Internet.” China now has the largest number of Internet users of any country in the world—more than 500 million people, 40 percent of its total population. As a result, most observers believe it is only a matter of time before more open debate—even on topics controversial in the eyes of the Communist Party—will become uncontrollable inside China. Already, a number of Chinese leaders have found it necessary to take to the Internet themselves in order to respond to public controversies. In neighboring Russia, former president Dmitri Medvedev also felt the pressure to engage personally on the Internet.
As the role played by the Internet and connected computing devices becomes more prominent and pervasive generally, authoritarian governments may find it increasingly difficult to exert the same degree of control. When the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, it was partly due to the fact that four out of every ten Tunisians were connected to the Internet, with almost 20 percent of them on Facebook (80 percent of the Facebook users were under the age of thirty).
So even though Tunisia was one of the countries cited by Reporters Without Borders as censoring political dissent on the Internet, the largely nonviolent revolution gained momentum with startling speed, and the pervasive access to the Internet within Tunisia made it difficult for the government to control the digital blossoming of public defiance. The man who set himself on fire in protest, Mohamed Bouazizi, was not the first to do so, but he was the first to be video-recorded doing so. It was the downloaded video that ignited the Arab Spring.
In Saudi Arabia, Twitter has facilitated public criticism of the government, and even of the royal family. As the number of tweets grew faster there in 2012 than in any other country, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer, Faisal Abdullah, told The New York Times, “Twitter for us is like a parliament, but not the kind of parliament that exists in this region. It’s a true parliament, where people from all political sides meet and talk freely.”
But experts in the region argue that it is important to look carefully at the interplay between the Internet and other significant factors in the Arab Spring—including some that were at least as important as the Internet in bringing about this sociopolitical explosion. The combination of population growth, the growing percentage of young people, economic stagnation, and rising food prices created the conditions for unrest. When governments in the region first promised economic and political reforms, then appeared to backtrack, the frustrations reached a boiling point.
The change that many analysts believe was most important in sowing the seeds of the Arab Spring was the introduction in 1996 of the feisty and relatively independent satellite television channel Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was soon followed by approximately 700 other satellite television channels that were easily accessed with small, cheap satellite dishes—even in countries where they are technically illegal. Several governments attempted to control the proliferation of small dishes, but the result was an incredible outburst of political discussion, including on topics that had not been debated openly before. By the time the Arab Spring erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, both access to satellite television and the Internet had spread throughout Egypt and the region. Sociologists and political scientists have had a difficult time parsing the relative influence of these two new electronic media in causing and feeding the Arab Spring, but most believe that Al Jazeera and its many siblings were the more important factor. In 2004, when then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak paid a visit to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, he said, “All that trouble from this little matchbox?” Perhaps both were necessary but neither was sufficient.
Like Tunisia, Egypt found it difficult to shut down access to the Internet in the way Myanmar and Iran had. By 2011 it was so pervasive that when the government blocked all of the Internet access points entering the country, the public’s reaction was so strong that the fires of revolt grew even hotter. The determination of the protesters ultimately succeeded in forcing Mubarak to step down, but their cohesion faded during the political struggle that followed.
Some analysts, including Malcolm Gladwell, have argued that online connections are inherently weak and often temporary because they do not support the stronger relationships formed when mass movements rely upon in-person gatherings. In Egypt, for example, the crowds of Tahrir Square actually represented a tiny fraction of Egypt’s huge population—and those in the rest of the country who sympathized with their complaints against the Mubarak government did not remain aligned with the protesters when the time came to form a new political consensus around what kind of government would follow Mubarak. The Egyptian military soon asserted its control of the government, and in the elections that followed, Islamist forces prevailed in establishing a new regime based on principles far different from those advocated by most of the Internet-inspired reformers who predominated in Tahrir Square.
Indeed, not only in Egypt but also in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere—including Iran—the same pattern has unfolded: an emergent reform movement powered by a new collective political consciousness born on the Internet has stimulated change, but failed to consolidate its victory. The forces of counterrevolution have tightened control of the media and have reestablished their dominance.
The unique history of communications technology in the Middle East and North Africa offers one of the reasons for the failure by reformers to consolidate their gains. The emergent political consciousness that accompanied the Print Revolution in Europe, and later North America, bypassed the Middle East and North Africa when the Ottoman Empire banned the printing press for Arabic-speaking peoples. This contributed to the isolation of the Ottoman-ruled lands from the rapid advances (such as the Scientific Revolution) that the printing press tri
ggered in Europe. Two centuries later, when Arab Muslims first asked the historic question “What went wrong?” part of the answer was that they had deprived themselves of the fruits of the Print Revolution.
As a result, the institutions that emerged in the West to embody representative democracy never formed in the Middle East. Centuries later, therefore, the new political consciousness born on the Internet could not easily be embodied in formal structures that could govern according to the principles articulated by the reformers. Yet the forces of authoritarianism could easily embody their desire to control society and the economy in the institutions that were already present—including the military, the national police, and the bureaucracies of autocratic rule.
Other analysts have connected the disappointment in the wake of Tahrir Square to what they regard as yet another example of “techno-optimism,” in which an exciting new technology is endowed with unrealistic hopes, while overlooking the simple fact that all technologies can be used for good or ill, depending on how they are used and who uses them to greatest effect. The Internet can be used not only by reformers, but also by opponents of reform. Still, the exciting promise of Internet-based reform—both in the delivery of public goods and, more crucially, in the revitalization of democracy—continues to inspire advocates of freedom, precisely because it enables and fosters the emergence of a new collective political consciousness within which individuals can absorb political ideas, contribute their own, and participate in a rapidly evolving political dialogue.
This optimism is further fueled by the fact that some governments providing services to individuals are making dramatic improvements in their ability to communicate important information on the Internet and engage in genuinely productive two-way communication with citizens. Some nations—most notably, Estonia—have even experimented with Internet voting in elections and referenda. In neighboring Latvia, two laws have already been passed as a result of proposals placed by citizens on a government website open to suggestions from the public. Any idea attaining the support of 10,000 people or more goes directly into a legislative process. In addition, many cities are using computerized statistics and sophisticated visual displays to more accurately target the use of resources and achieve higher levels of quality in the services they deliver. Some activists promoting Internet-based forms of democracy, including NYU professor Clay Shirky, have proposed imaginative ways to use open source programming to link citizens together in productive dialogues and arguments about issues and legislation.
In Western countries, however, the potential for Internet-based reform movements has been blunted. Even in the United States, in spite of the prevailing hopes that the Internet will eventually reinvigorate democracy, it has thus far failed to do so. In order to understand why, it is important to analyze the emerging impact of the Internet on political consciousness in the broader context of the historic relationship between communications media and governance—with particular attention to the displacement of print media by the powerful mass medium of television.
In the politics of many countries—including the United States—we find ourselves temporarily stuck in a surprisingly slow transition from the age of television to the age of the Internet. Television is still by far and away the dominant communications medium in the modern world. More people even watch Internet videos on television screens than on computer screens. Eventually, bandwidth limitations on high-quality video will become less of a hindrance and television will, in the words of novelist William Gibson, “be appropriated into the realm of the digital.” But until it does, broadcast, cable, and satellite television will continue to dominate the public square. As a result, both candidates and leaders of reform movements will continue to face the requirement of paying a king’s ransom for the privilege of communicating effectively with the mass public.
Well before the Internet and computer revolution was launched, the introduction of electronic media had already begun transforming the world that had been shaped by the printing press. In a single generation, television displaced print as the dominant form of mass communication. Even now, while the Internet is still in its early days, Americans spend more time watching television than in any other activity besides sleeping and working. The average American now watches television more than five hours per day. Largely as a result, the average candidate for Congress spends 80 percent of his or her campaign money on thirty-second television advertising.
To understand the implications for democracy that flow from the continuing dominance of television, consider the significant differences between the information ecosystem of the printing press and the information ecosystem of television. First of all, access to the virtual public square that emerged in the wake of the print revolution was extremely cheap; Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door in Philadelphia and easily find several low-cost print shops.
Access to the public square shaped by television, though, is extremely expensive. The small group of corporations that serve as gatekeepers controlling access to the mass television audience is now more consolidated than ever before and continues to charge exorbitant sums for that access. If a modern-day Thomas Paine walked to the nearest television station and attempted to broadcast a televised version of Common Sense, he would be laughed off the premises if he could not pay a small fortune. By contrast, paid pundits whose views reflect the political philosophy of the corporations that own most networks are given many hours each week to promulgate their ideology.
So long as commercial television dominates political discussion, candidates will find it necessary to solicit large and ever growing sums of money from wealthy individuals, corporations, and special interests to gain access to the only public square that matters when the majority of voters spend the majority of their free time staring at television screens. This requirement, in turn, has led to the obscene dominance of decision making in American democracy by these same wealthy contributors—especially corporate lobbies. Because recent Supreme Court decisions—especially the Citizens United case—have overturned long-standing prohibitions against the use of corporate funds to support candidates, this destructive trend is likely to get much worse before it gets better. It is, in a very real sense, a slow-motion corporate coup d’état that threatens to destroy the integrity and functioning of American democracy.
Although the political systems and legal regimes of countries vary widely, the relative roles of television and the Internet are surprisingly similar. It is notable that in both China and Russia, television is much more tightly controlled than the Internet. In the Potemkin democracy that has been constructed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the government is choosing to tolerate a much freer, more robust freedom of speech on the Internet than on television. Mikhail Kasyanov, one of the prime ministers who served under Putin (and whose candidacy for president against Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, was derailed when Putin ordered him removed from the ballot), told me that when he was prime minister under Putin he was given clear instructions that debate on the Internet mattered little so long as the government exercised tight control over what appeared on Russian television.
Four years later, in the spring of 2012, the Internet-inspired protest movement challenging the obviously fraudulent process used in the first round of the elections (in which Putin was ultimately victorious, as expected), one Russian analyst said, “The old people come and the old people come and the old people come and all vote for one candidate—for Putin. Why are they voting for Putin? Watch TV. There is one face: Putin.” And indeed, one of the many reasons for television’s dominance in the political media landscape of almost every country is that older people both simultaneously vote in higher percentages and watch television more hours per day than any other age group. In the U.S., people aged sixty-five and older watch, on average, almost seven hours per day.
In many nations, institutions important to the rise and survival of democracy, like journalism, have also been profoundly affected by the historic transfo
rmation of communications technology. Newspapers have fallen on hard times. They used to be able to bundle together revenue from subscriptions, commercial advertising, and classified advertising to pay not only for the printing and distribution of their papers but also the salaries of professional reporters, editors, and investigative journalists. With the introduction of television—and particularly with the launch of evening television news programs—the afternoon newspapers in most major cities that people used to read upon returning home from work were the first to go bankrupt. The loss of increasing amounts of commercial advertising to television and radio also began to hurt the morning newspapers. Then, when classified advertising migrated en masse to the Internet and the widespread availability of online news sources led many readers to stop their subscriptions to newspapers, the morning newspapers began to go bankrupt as well.
Eventually, Internet-based journalism will begin to thrive. In the U.S., digital news stories already reach more people than either newspapers or radio. As yet, however, a high percentage of quality journalism available on the Internet is still derived from the repurposing of articles originally prepared for print publications. And there are as yet few business models for journalism originating on the Internet that bundle together enough revenue to support the salaries of reporters engaged in the kind of investigative journalism essential to provide accountability in a democracy.
Like the journalism essential to its flourishing, democracy itself is now stuck in this odd and dangerous transition era that falls between the waning age of the printing press and the still nascent maturation of effective democratic discourse on the Internet. Reformers and advocates of the public interest are connecting with one another in ever larger numbers over the Internet and are searching with ever greater intensity for ways to break through the quasi-hypnotic spell cast over the mass television audience—day after day, night after night—by constant, seductive, expensive, and richly produced television programming.