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I was just asked to post this on the Harvard UP blog, and hope some
will find it relevant to the current conversations:<br>
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2009/06/revolutions-and-the-politics-of-networks.html">http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2009/06/revolutions-and-the-politics-of-networks.html</a><br>
<br>
<h3 class="entry-header">“Revolutions” and the Politics of Networks</h3>
<div class="entry-body">
<p style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana;"><em>... with
special reference to the role played by the internet during the recent
developments in Iran.</em></p>
<p>----------</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Jeff Jarvis calls it <a
href="http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/06/17/the-api-revolution/"
target="_blank">“the API revolution”</a>
(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 <a
href="http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/qa_with_clay_sh.php" target="_blank">“the
big one”</a>:</p>
<div class="blockquote" style="margin-left: 40px;">...
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.<br>
</div>
<p>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? </p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>The point I hope to make here, and one that I make at greater length
in my book <em><strong><a
href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GOLCUL.html">The Cultural
Logic of Computation</a></strong></em>,
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. </p>
<p>As Chris Rhoads and Loretta Chao discuss in an <a
href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html"
target="_blank"
title=""Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology" -- WSJ, 6/22/09">article
this week</a>
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 <a
href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105775075&ft=1&f=1004"
target="_blank"
title=""Iran Uses Tech Tools To Censor Dissent" - All Things Considered, 6/22/09">interview
on NPR</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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
href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/22/former-deputy-national-security-advisor-twitter-founders-should-get-nobel-peace-prize/"
target="_blank"
title="TechCrunch - "Bush Advisor: Twitter Founders Should Get Nobel Peace Prize"">a
former Bush national security advisor who suggested</a>,
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.</p>
</div>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
David Golumbia
Assistant Professor
Media Studies, English, and Linguistics
University of Virginia</pre>
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