In Prospect’s December cover story, “How dictators watch us on the web”, Evgeny Morozov criticises my views on the impact of social media on political unrest. Indeed, he even says I am “the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet.” In part, I would like to agree with some of his criticisms, while partially disputing some of his assertions too.
Let me start with a basic statement of belief: because civic life is not just created by the actions of individuals, but by the actions of groups, the spread of mobile phones and internet connectivity will reshape that civic life, changing the ways members of the public interact with one another.
Though germane, this argument says little to nothing about the tempo, mode, or ultimate shape such a transformation will take. There are a number of possible scenarios for changed interaction between the public and the state, some rosy, others distinctly less so. Crucially however, Morozov’s reading is in response to a specific strain of internet utopianism—let’s call it the “just-add-internet” hypothesis. In this model, the effect of social media on the lives of citizens in authoritarian regimes will be swift, unstoppable, and positive—a kind of digitised 1989. And it will lead us to expect the prominence of social media in any society’s rapid democratisation.
While this argument is overtly simplistic, I have nonetheless helped fuel it by discussing mechanisms through which citizens can coordinate group action, while failing to note the ways that visible public action also provides new counter-moves to repressive regimes. Morozov is right to criticise me for this imbalance, and for the resulting (and undue) optimism it engenders about social media as a democratising force; I stand corrected.
Nevertheless, I want to defend the notion—which Morozov goes after in the “man most responsible for intellectual confusion” section of his essay—that social media improves political information cascades, as outlined by the political scientist Susanne Lohmann. It also represents a new dynamic within political protest, which will alter the struggle between insurrectionists and the state, even if the state wins in any given clash. Where this will lead to a net advantage for popular uprisings in authoritarian regimes is an open question—and a point on which Morozov and I still disagree on—but the new circumstances of coordinated public action, I believe, marks an essential change in the civilian part of the “arms race.”
Lohmann’s mechanism for how information cascades operate is simple: when a small group is willing to take public action against a regime, and the regime’s reaction is muted, it provides information about the value of participation to the group of citizens who opted not to participate. Some members of this group will then join in the next round of protests.
In turn, further non-reaction by the regime will provide additional information to the next group of “fence-sitters,” thereby increasing participation. Consequently, strong reaction by the regime can be effective in putting down insurrection, but at the same time risks constraining and, in extreme cases, delegitimising the regime itself. If the regime acts late, it can thus lose in one of two ways: the insurrections can win, or the state can win, but at Pyrrhic costs. Between those two cases, the state can also succeed in putting down the insurrection at low cost to itself.
Prior to the spread of social media, a typical classic case of late and failed reaction by the regime to an information cascade is the one documented by Lohmann, around the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. The classic case of late and successful reaction by a regime is Tiananmen Square and, even there, the subsequent alteration of the Chinese state continues to be driven in part by the recognition that without continued economic improvement, the same forces that drove insurrection might return. Though the regime always holds most of the power, insurrections that take advantage of the dynamics of information cascades thus offer protesters both offensive and defensive capabilities that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
But both these examples took place prior to the invention of the internet and widespread use of mobile phones. The question, today, is what the increased ability on the part of citizens armed with those tools can do to achieve shared public knowledge and coordinated action.