The Net — Democratic Panacea Or Autocratic Tool? 204
Alex writes "On April 6, 10,000 protesters organized in Moldova against the nation's Communist leadership by utilizing new media like Twitter and Facebook, demonstrating the ever-increasing potential of the Internet as a democratic and liberating tool. But in the current Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov critiques the view that the internet will inevitably democratize autocratic regimes like China, Russia and Iran. He argues that the Net's democratic effects are not inherent, and that autocratic regimes have been successful in controlling electronic media to disseminate their ideology. Will the net ultimately spread American democracy, or just American entertainment?"
How about other democracies? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us have our own democratic systems not based on the US.
This is so arrogant (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't believe it.
You had and have Actors as heads of state, only two parties one can vote for, tolerate torture, infiltrate other countries ...
WTF is democratic about that. Please go away and do not spread ANYTHING in the world, thank you.
The witch hunters are your answer. (Score:4, Insightful)
The net has the potential to be a near indestructible tool for democracy and free exchange of information if, and only if, full anonymity were possible.
And that is why this aspect of the net is seen as the ultimate danger to authoritarians, and so no effort is to be spared to destroy any attempts at fully anonymous net. And so enter the "save the children" crusaders and witch-hunters, who somehow, strangely, rather then focus on abused children seem to focus on thought crimes which, also incidentally, require wholesale removal of anonymity from the net to "stop" ...
Combine this with efforts at whipping up frothing-at-the-snout frenzy and moral panic amongst the general population and the author of the article is right: the net will slowly but surely become the tool of power holders.
Of course there are all sorts of other excuses (like libel etc) why the net has to become non-anonymous, all of them bogus in light of what is being lost versus what is being gained. But then again that is the point, as the "cost" to the ruling elites everywhere is frightening.
Get Over It (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the US realy a democracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rigged voting machines, lying government, involved in wars all over the globe under false pretense, constant and flagrant erosion of our rights yada yada yada thank god for america.
America is a Democracy? (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought it was a Corporatocracy, based on the ample evidence that just about everyone in Washington is bought by one corporation or the other with campaign donations and backroom deals.
I know Americans get to vote every now and then, but a substantial portion of the results are suitably processed by unverifiable digital "voting systems" to ensure that the people won't accidentally vote wrong. Not that it matters much as both US parties are essentially the same.
American Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Why American Democracy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Russia? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, the most influential (and richest) industries of the country are controlled by families who had relations with Putin or KGB/army in the 90s. Putin designed his Deputy Prime Minister to become the presidential candidate , Putin left the presidence to become Prime Minister, the former Putin's Prime Minister now is Deputy Prime Minister...
Yes, it sounds like an autocracy.
American democracy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ha! You mean the one we can witness in Iraq and Afghanistan at this very moment?
The Bush administration's rendition (torture) policy, and Obama's approval and continuation of it? The unconstitutional wiretapping of US citizens? Attack wars on sovereign nations for oil and political dominance? The notion of the executive branch being untouchable by any law?
Wow, I cerainly hope the net is not about spreading that ideology.
Sure, American "Democracy" (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it that the US is a major target of Amnesty International again? What about your warrentless wire-tapping? Exceedingly low voter turn out. Etc, etc, etc.
Seriously, if you want to spread democracy, then the first step would be to actually have one.
Re:Russia? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can consider it autocratic. Presidential and parlamentary elections are faked on regular basis, governors are installed from Kremlin (elections were abolished not so long ago), courts are funded from city budgets and judges are installed by the president and the parliament majority, so called "United Russia" has Putin as the leader. So there is no de facto separation of powers, the president and prime minister decide. :-)
Oh, and journalists and bloggers are killed and imprisoned for their opinions. We also have the infamous "282 article" in criminal codex which de facto forbids any criticism of state. So yes, Russia may be considered autocratic if not "Soviet" again
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Printing Press - Democratic Panacea Or Autocratic Tool?
How about disruptive technology and useful tool? How it is used depends on the people, not the technology.
Re:The witch hunters are your answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree but there's a difference between democracy and mob rule. If the days of the state being able to controlling the news media are over, what are the drooling masses going to have knee-jerk emotional reactions to now? I fear that the internet may lead to lone wolf behaivour in the cyber realms.
Re:This is so arrogant (Score:1, Insightful)
If a party represents 4% of the people, it should have a small effect on who becomes the prime minister. In no country does 4% alone decide that but if parties are otherwise in a tie, that 4% of the people not yet included in the tie will decide. I honestly see nothing unfair about that.
USA being the first modern democracy is arguable too. Correct me if I am wrong, but blacks were allowed to vote very, very late. It is a matter of definition of democracy whether you can be counted as having one when significant groups aren't allowed to vote. I hear that in some states, criminals aren't allowed to vote even now!
Where I live, being older than 18 and a citizen are only things on which your voting right depends on (and there is a lot of talk about lowering that age to 16). It has been like that nearly a century. I could make a point that we are older "modern democracy" than USA.
Re:American Democracy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This is so arrogant (Score:3, Insightful)
That simply depends on how you define "modern" and "democracy". Great Britain had a functional democracy long before the United States of America.
Re:How about other democracies? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I could moderate the article "-1 flamebait". A better term is "Western Liberal Democracy", that's all the good things that we all agree on, and yet isn't exclusive to a single country.
Re:American Democracy (Score:1, Insightful)
America has just spent the last 5 years torturing people and invading a country against international law with American soldiers massacring its population with impunity. It's a terrible role model for democracy.
Let's not get carried away here... Massacring its population with impuity?? I know that the Americans killed a large number of civilians in military screwups and I am no fan of the Bush administration or the variant of Republican political philosophy it represents in general but I find it hard to believe that the US military has a policy of wilfully slaughtering Iraqi or Afghani civilians. I am not old enough to have lived through WWII but I know several people who witnessed the US/UK bombing of Germany and I know people who lived through the Nazi death camps of WWII, now those were wilful, premeditated, genocidal massacres of civilians. War is never easy on civilians and neither is insurgency but to claim that the US is deliberately massacring civilians is an exaggeration.
Re:How about other democracies? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Get Over It (Score:5, Insightful)
As a citizen of a country that uses parliamentary proportional representation and has strong protections for workers and limitations on what companies can and cannot do in order to try to force their customers/employees to obey, I have to respectfully disagree.
Re:This is so arrogant (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but then you would not be able to eat at *our* McDonalds.
Really? Thanks!
Or smoke *our* fine cigarettes.
No problem.
And you would have to stop pirating all of our movies. The price is just to steep for you.
Did that a long time ago.
Now that that's all straightened out, will your country please stop meddling in my country's affairs?
Re:American Democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
America has just spent the last 5 years torturing people and invading a country against international law with American soldiers massacring its population with impunity. It's a terrible role model for democracy.
There are several comments in this thread that would be good as a jumping-off point for the role of the Net in preventing authoritarian tendencies. Yours seemed good. Congratulations!
Let's look at a few things:
1) The US has, by law if not necessarily by practice, one of the freest flows of information in the world. There is no prior restraint (q.v. UK, Canada), there are no laws restricting hate speech (q.v. Germany), libel cases are notoriously hard to prosecute (lots of places), and judges have historically given a lot of protection to people who bring forth government "secrets" which expose wrongdoing by members of the government.
2) While I won't say there was no vote fraud anywhere, because I don't believe that, the democratic processes here work pretty well on the whole. Let's say that 99% of the voters in the US were able to get to the polls and voted for the candidate of their choice. The US is not Zimbabwe.
3) What was going on vis a vis torture, detentions, illegal declarations of war, etc. was not some big secret that you had to get from samizdat sold in a back alley. Pick up a major newspaper, tune into NPR, or even watch CNN, and what the Bush administration was doing was being lovingly documented, even if there was a lot more deference to state power than the situation deserved. And, of course, any one of a number of bloggers and alternative news sources dug in to their offenses with relish.
So, with all that access to information, Mr. Bush and his enablers won two Presidential elections and three (arguably more if you go back to 1994) congressional elections. While a lot of heat is made of potential vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, the fact is that most states were not very close. (FWIW Bush lost my state [wikipedia.org] by 5% the first time and 7% the second time).
The question this poses is, if so much chicanery can be done in plain sight, with the approval of we the people in a society with some of the best access to information on the planet, what difference can the Internet make in a country without this sort of infrastructure? I would argue that if you control the primary sources of information, what leaks out around it does not make much difference. This is unfortunately a human and not a technical problem.
Re:American 'democracy' (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes feel free to spout off any nonsense you feel like.
The US has a long history of third parties springing up, or independents running for election. A recent example example is Ross Perot who won 19% of the vote in the 1992 presidential election. In 2000 it was the votes won by the Green Party (Ralph Nader) that were the difference between Bush or Gore winning.
The fact is that it isn't just two people on the ballot. The number is more usually 10 or so in a presidential election. You are free to vote for any one of them.
And that isn't counting the primary system where Americans vote for and choose who will run for the party in the upcoming elections. How do you think that Obama became president? By winning voters during the primary run. Often dozens of candidates are available to choose from across the various parties.
And at the local level it is even more pronounced. I've had neighbors get fed up with the current local officials, say on the school board and just up and run on their own. And get elected.
Also let's be clear about what democracy really is. I grew up in a town that is run as an Athenian style democracy where voters in the town voted on EVERY issue.
Also let us know when in Europe a person of mixed race like Obama is elected President of a MAJOR state like France or Germany. That is when you;ll know you have a strong, open democratic process.
Re: indestructible tools for democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
A gun is also an indestructible tool for democracy... or an indestructible tool for totalitarianism. The American founding fathers used them to (try to) create democracy, but the British of the time also used them to try to prevent it. Tools are, by definition, agnostic to the human "causes" to which they are applied.
Democracy doesn't require the sort of anonymity you're promoting. No one else in human history has ever enjoyed or needed it for the sake of democracy. The founding fathers didn't need it. The American Constitution, contrary to popular misunderstanding, does not enshrine it; it is not a basic "right".
Actually, what is enshrined in our democratic system is quite the reverse: the right to be able to confront one's accuser. That is one of the fundamental tenets of our jurisdprudent system.
You can't have it both ways, but you and other misguided people will no doubt keep trying, for selfish reasons.
Re:This is so arrogant (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, in the same way you would no doubt consider the United States of America a democracy even though it denied suffrage to women until the 1920's and practices racial segregation well into the 1960's.
-1, Clueless (Score:2, Insightful)
Everything on the web doesn't need to be done from a perspective that you find acceptable.
Re:How about other democracies? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish I could moderate the article "-1 flamebait". A better term is "Western Liberal Democracy", that's all the good things that we all agree on, and yet isn't exclusive to a single country.
Why not call it French Democracy? Theirs is the model for the American one at least.