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Welcome to this event, which is jointly sponsored by the European Studies Centre, the DONDO Programme for the Study of Freedom,

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the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Oxford University Project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics.

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A subject today is does the Internet help people power?

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The question posed already in relation to people power movements in Ukraine, Iran,

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Burma, Belarus and of course, even as we speak, or least even as I speak in Tunisia.

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And just to give you a get you in the mood. Let me give you.

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Part of President Gadhafi's reaction to the role of the Internet in these events.

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I quote, even you, my Tunisian brothers, you may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet.

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A Kleenex is what Gadhafi calls WikiLeaks and this Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write it.

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Do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner.

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It can suck anything, any useless person, any lawyer, any drunkard, anyone high on drugs can talk on the internet.

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And you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free show.

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We become the victims of Facebook and Kleenex and YouTube.

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No. Shall we become victims? The tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods.

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Thus, the question of the day is posed by President Gadhafi.

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I'm to pose a question and perhaps slightly more scholarly form.

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We're delighted to have Katie Morozov and John Lloyd.

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Evgeny Morozov was born in Belarus in 1984.

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So he was clearly predestined to write about the Internet and dictatorships,

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which he has done extremely originally, knowledgeably and provocatively in many places,

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challenging what he calls the cyber utopianism characteristic, particularly of a certain US approach to these things.

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And he's pulled this argument together in his book, which has just been published.

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It's called The Net Delusion. It's available for anyone to buy at a knockdown price in old fashioned paper form just in the foyer.

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And we're delighted that he's with us today to present his argument on the specific question.

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Of does the Internet help or by implication, hinder people power?

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Or more precisely, in what ways does it do the one or the other?

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Am I? Respondent is John Lloyd, who is director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in this university,

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extremely well known as one of this country's leading writers about analysts of journalism and the media,

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but also someone who has written as a journalist from Russia for many years,

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has written a book about Russia and therefore knows very well at least one of the

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regional contexts which Evgeny Morozov is very familiar with and comes out of.

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Evgeny will speak for no more than 20 minutes.

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I have the internationally familiar language of the.

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Yellow and red cards to control his time.

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John will speak for no more than 10 minutes and there will be plenty of time for discussion.

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And I should just mention that in the spirit of our subject, everything we say will soon be on the Internet.

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On the Oxford University i-Tunes site.

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Again, thank you so much.

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I think judging by the introduction, it's now clear that Khadafi will be in high demand for book blurbs in the season to come.

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Maybe I should ask him instead of Gladwell for the next dark side book to do that.

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But yes, let me tell you first about what this book is not about.

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I'm not in any way denying the power of the Internet and social media to help people organise themselves.

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I get to do the state's war campaign on their shirts that are political, the social that might be environmental.

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All of that is happening. In all of that,

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I think to various degrees should be encouraged by supporters of democracy in the West to better help you understand why I think about this subject.

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It's not only about, you know, I come from Belarus.

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I was privileged to have a very early experience with what in my eyes is a very successful project of how the West can help democratisation.

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And that is George Soros,

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this open society institute in I benefited from their scholarship to go study and eventually I joined the board of the information

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program which actually spends a lot of time thinking how to use technology and new media to promote democratic and open society values.

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So my interest in this is very pragmatic, actually.

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I want the Internet to help.

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So in no way am I, you know, a curmudgeon that denies the power of the media, even though sometimes I do sound a little bit curmudgeon.

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Like that's sad.

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I think it's very important for us not to lose sight of the fact that it's not just the power of mobilisation that social media brings.

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It's also, in many contexts the power to track and identify dissidents and protesters.

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Let me just contrast what I think happened in Belarus just two months ago, was what happened in Tunisia, just to show some of the,

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I think, very interesting differences in the way in which social media and the Internet could actually affect certain countries.

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So what happened in Belarus was very interesting in the sense that the government on

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the day of the election on December 19th said didn't shut down the entire Internet.

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What they did was only to shut down one Internet protocol, you know, HDP, which basically is the secure version.

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To put it very broadly, the secure version of the normal HDP protocol,

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which is now used in all in most e-mail services in sites increasingly like Facebook and Twitter.

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And what that basically did to anyone who wanted to use Internet in Belarus is that while some websites were available,

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people couldn't get them to the email simply because email requires established protocol, right?

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People couldn't get through social media like Twitter and Facebook because they too now increasingly demand tidbits for people to log in.

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That happened for just, I think, six or 7 hours right before the polling booths closed.

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Right. The other thing which happened was we also think it was very interesting that the government was someone who didn't like the opposition,

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launched attacks on the websites of the opposition media, which were actually informing the people about the protests.

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And so people could actually find out what was happening and where the protest were taking place,

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in part because the websites were is available or for a very brief period of time on Sunday during the elections they even managed to replace,

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while they managed to redirect anyone who would visit an oppositional website to a page that was one day old.

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So basically everyone who would visit that website would only see news from yesterday.

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They wouldn't see all of the update of, you know, news published about the protests.

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So and of course, most of those websites, city law, they knew that that would be happening and they relied on email.

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They saw that they would be able to send an email message to all of their subscribers and inform them even if their websites becoming available.

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But of course, since the HDP protocol was down, they couldn't use email.

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Also. So in a sense, they ended up without their website and without their backup system through

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which they could actually inform all of their subscribers through mailing lists.

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So the most disturbing part and that's the final part, the final bit I'll say about Belarus,

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the most disturbing part was that there are now reports that the government is actually asking mobile operators

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for details of everyone who had a mobile phone and was in the protest zone on the day of the protests.

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Right. Again, the technology for that exists.

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The mobile operators know who was where and when they could easily link, you know, the numbers to the names.

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And the idea is that the government, you know, if they really want to,

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they would go and start prosecuting the people who actually showed up at the protest.

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Could I just clarify? They're asking the mobile phone operators.

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Yes. Those are, you know, the people who, you know, run the mobile towers so they can actually triangulate who was where.

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And this is technology that is available.

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So this is the, you know, example of Belarus, where I think social media, of course,

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that help to an extent to publicise what was happening the way reports on Twitter.

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The darker side of things is that, you know,

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the government managed to stay in power and if they really want to go and start cracking down on dissidents and anyone who was protesting,

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they're in that position in a much better position, I would argue,

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than they were before social media to actually go and indentify who those people where.

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And I think this is a very good distinction.

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The same, by the way, to an extent happened in Iran, where the government also, after the protests died down,

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turned to social media websites for evidence and for any hints of who where those protesters they would.

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At some point, they posted photos that were initially posted to Flickr on the websites of the government run news agencies,

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asking people to identify if they can recognise any of the faces in the photos.

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There was, of course, also a lot of searching on sites like Facebook and Twitter, trying to identify,

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you know, whether Iranians who are participating in the protests have any connections with foreigners.

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And some of that was also used in court as evidence that, you know, some of the protests were actually organised and inspired by by the West.

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So the lesson that I learned from this is that, you know,

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while social media can be extremely useful in publicising what's happening and then mobilising people, if the protest, you know,

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topple the government and if the government stays in power, I guess their capacity to track down everyone who's participated,

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who's been participating in the protest is greater than it has been in the past.

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But this is one sad lesson that I draw from the events.

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If you look at what happened in Tunisia recently, I think the situation is more optimistic now,

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but I think it's more optimistic in part because, you know, Benali left and we still don't know which way the government will turn.

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If the government wanted to engage in acts of repression, they would have plenty of evidence and plenty of hands to identify.

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You know, the people. Again, we can argue whether the people who are participating in the protests were fully aware of the risks.

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Some of them probably where some of them were willing to go and, you know, sacrifice their lives, as we have seen in Tunisia.

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However, I would like to urge you to go back to some of the initial assumptions about the promise of social media.

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That promise was that it would actually be possible for this of the movements to tap into a new, you know, reserve force,

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if you wish, of people power of people who are not yet, you know, dissidents themselves, people who are just on Facebook,

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YouTube of, you know, watching cat videos, who would be able to get, you know, to join the course because they see something online and because,

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you know, they don't think it's it's much to sign up to a Facebook group or send a Twitter message.

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Right. So the problem, the early promise was that it would be possible to go beyond the dissidents and scale the protests.

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So this is, I think, the criteria that we need to keep in mind.

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It's not that, you know, it's just the dissidents, it's the broader movement.

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And that's the broader movement, which I think is not fully aware of the risks that mobile technology poses or that Facebook poses or how changes,

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you know, in Facebook's privacy policy may actually affect the security of its users.

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Looking at Tunisia, yeah, I think what I found very fascinating is that, you know,

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just a week ago when, you know, the protests have been going on for something like City of Works,

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the government was still bold and strong enough to actually go and hack into the email accounts of the activists and go and break,

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you know, and start all sorts of scams on Facebook where they would also be able to get.

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The user details, passwords and such of the users involved.

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So if you look at Tunisia, the government's ability to control the Internet did not yet recur.

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So again, if you look at the sort of political and social forces shaping what was happening, you know,

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if they turn the other way and the government stayed in power and Ben Ali stayed,

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and they really wanted to go and really engage in crackdowns and the depression.

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I think they could have you know, the technology was there and the ability was there.

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They were recording everything, as they said, there was still breaking into the accounts of the dissidents and bloggers up until the very end.

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If you look at some of the crowd at which sites like Twitter and Facebook and especially WikiLeaks go out through what happened in Tunisia,

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I think partly reflects and supports.

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My sense is that there is just too much hype and excitement about the power of the Internet.

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If you look at some of the commentary in the American media and particularly American mainstream

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blogosphere like Andrew Sullivan and others who are touting the Twitter revolution in Iran,

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they're now also touting the WikiLeaks revolution in Tunisia.

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And there is nothing wrong with trying to understand the contribution that WikiLeaks has made to the events in the media.

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And probably it played some role, if not in telling Tunisians that their government is corrupt, corrupt, which of course, most of them knew.

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But at least I'm telling them that this may not be enjoying the support of the American government any longer.

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So on that level, it may have had some impact.

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It may have also made an impact in terms of revealing that, you know what everyone knew.

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Right. There is this interesting insight and collective, you know,

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action serious that it's not just what you know is that, you know, you should know what others know.

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So once everyone knew of the same things, you know, probably they were more likely to act collectively.

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But my problem with many of this assumptions, which I think are valid, is that once you put them together and you add some, you know,

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cyber top end is on top, you end up thinking that, you know, WikiLeaks is bound to produce similar outcomes in other countries.

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Well, Twitter's produce is likely to produce similar outcomes in other countries.

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So there is this deterministic narrative, which is often the better than our,

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you know, understanding or what the Twitter or Facebook or WikiLeaks revolution is.

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And I think this is the wrong deterministic narrative.

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Even if you look at a country like Belarus, which what I found fascinating is that the government itself seemed to be very happy about WikiLeaks.

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In the case of Belarus,

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they were actually Lukashenka in one of his speeches immediately after the elections mentioned WikiLeaks six times ahead of his speech.

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And, you know, the reason why he does so is because the only things that WikiLeaks cables

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can reveal is that America is supporting the opposition movement in Belarus,

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which for Lukashenka is great because it helps him today militarised the

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opposition and to basically weaken them and portray them as agents of the West.

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So what happens in Belarus in the last two weeks is that they actually appeared,

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the cables that were not published by WikiLeaks originally and were not published by The Guardian,

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but they were published by media, affiliated with the state, documenting how the American government is smuggling money to the Belarussian opposition.

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Right. And I can assure you that it didn't help the prospects of democratisation in Belarus.

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Right. So again, we have to be very careful about, you know, labelling anything.

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And that's part of my argument. We have to be very careful about labelling anything.

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It's a Twitter, WikiLeaks or Facebook revolution, in part because social media does not have the same deterministic effect everywhere.

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And the most conditions,

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the vector of the change is determined by the existing political and social situation on the ground and not by the logic of the technology.

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So how much time ahead?

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About 7 minutes. Okay. So what else do the governments, though, beyond, you know, just tracking what people are doing?

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And I think this also is very important to understand because my my interest in the book and I know that you

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want to talk more about people power with my interest in the book is what happens between the protests right.

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And then what happens between the situation. People are mobilised.

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If you do assume that social media and the Internet is making protest more effective, to some extent,

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you also have to evaluate whether the Internet and social media is actually making the protest more likely to begin with.

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And this is the second question that interests me much more than the first one, because I think the first one is more.

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Like question of economics. Yes. Social media reduces costs of collective action.

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It makes coordination easier. It makes access to information easier.

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I mean, all of that to me seems pretty clear. And it's not thriller shape all that much, but the political situation.

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The second question, whether the protest is becoming less likely,

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even though it is becoming more effective, I think is a much more challenging question.

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And here you really have to look beyond the power of mobilisation and look at

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how the governments themselves are using social media for their own purposes.

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I think it differs from country to country, but here you do have to look at things like how social media facilitate surveillance.

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You do have to look at things like how social media facilitates the production of propaganda and

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how the even mode of propaganda is different in social media than it is in traditional media.

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I mean, I look at the country like Russia where, you know,

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there are a lot of very interesting new media in 13 years and new media groups who are all there knowledgeable about the Internet.

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They have been online since 1995. In some cases, they are, you know, the pioneers of the Russian Internet.

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Many of them ended up working for the Kremlin, running a pro-government conservative.

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You know, news sites, social media sites and building new media empires, which contributed a little to the democratisation in Russia.

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And to me, this is a much more challenging political and social question,

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because here, if you really want to draw conclusions about the power of the Internet,

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you really have to examine every country and look at how the governments with their own

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existing political and social agendas are shaping the Internet according to their own needs.

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My problem with having many people in Washington, I enthusiastically embrace the power of the Internet.

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And as you may have noticed in the last 12 months,

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they haven't really a grasp on this front with Hillary Clinton delivering a very high profile speech about Internet freedom with,

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you know, a lot of American politicians speaking up about it is that they lose sight of the fact that,

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you know, America is not neutral for this debate.

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America has its own domestic agenda with regards to the power of the Internet and with regards to minimising the

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damage caused by sites like WikiLeaks and caused by Internet piracy and caused by the threat of cyber warfare.

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All of that points away from Internet freedom as such.

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And on the second level, you have another concern, which I think most politicians and decision makers in America don't have air of,

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which is that much of this protest, much of this mobilisation is facilitated by American companies,

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facilitated by third parties, facilitated by Facebook. It's facilitated by, you know, in some cases, Google and Skype.

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And all of them are, as we know, American companies and are when they facilitate political change.

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It backfires on American companies and on the American government,

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particularly when the American government explicitly endorses Twitter revolution in Iran and,

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you know, makes much to sort of create this impression that they were somehow tinkering

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with what was happening during the protests when they famously reached out.

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So my argument here is that it's very hard for America to keep an honest face here, because on the one hand,

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they themselves domestically are cracking down on many of these companies because they want more surveillance power to, you know, for law enforcement.

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They want more control towards situations like WikiLeaks, which, of course,

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then is being exploited by the governments and Russia and China and Iran, where they point to the the publicity of the American government.

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And what they want to do is to replace many of this American players with the local domestic ones.

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Right. So here again,

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we will soon be seeing a transition from much of this protest being facilitated by American companies and European companies to some extent,

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who have much better rules and standards when it comes to freedom of expression.

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They just respect the users more. You know, they have more transparent mechanisms of how they deal with protest.

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You know, if you set up a Facebook group that wants to challenge established cultural,

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you know, Moors and, you know, Pakistan or, you know, Iran or Russia or China,

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chances are your group is more likely to survive on the local social networking site if that site is American,

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if that site is local, in part because it's just much easier for the local governments to pressure this companies.

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So the big question. But I think many people in America and in Brussels, to some extent in Europe have to answer is whether it is worth living.

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The Internet, you know, as it is dominated by American players without having you know,

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without making any controversial remarks about Internet theorem, Twitter revolutions and such or, you know, very,

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very aggressively go after the subjects and potentially risk that all of this companies and services will be replaced by local players,

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and they will be replaced by local players that are less than countries like Russia and China, simply because they have this.

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They're sitting in piles of cash.

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They have felt that the engineers in chances are, you know, by 2020, they'll own half of Silicon Valley because they need to expand somewhere.

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Right. And we will be seeing an increased connection between this debates, whether, you know, by those should be allowed to send,

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you know, cars taking photos of American cities and towns the way Google wants to go around China,

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making, you know, photos of Chinese cities and towns and all of those debates about trade,

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about, you know, some of them will be about national security.

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They will be affecting the power of many of this Web sites to affect social change and to be used for activism.

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So, you know, some of the arguments I'm making in the book is simply trying to draw attention to

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the factors that will be that will be shaping the power of this web in the future.

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I mean, even if they have been the fact that up until now, which is something I do not necessarily deny,

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we have to be extremely careful about preserving that possibility for the future and making those websites

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less susceptible to tracking surveillance and many of the other factors that they outlined at the beginning.

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So the key takeaway message is that it's it's it's all in flux.

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The social media landscape, I think, is changing tremendously.

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It's being shaped by forces that are most decision makers who speak enthusiastically

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about Internet freedom and Twitter revolutions do not fully understand.

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And I think we have to be very cautious about setting expectations on subjects like Internet freedom in the foreign context,

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so high that our own domestic, you know, mistakes will cost us dearly and make us look extremely duplicitous.

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The thing I'll stop here and I hope we will have some good going.

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Thank you very much, Evgeny. Laying out the argument very clearly. A lot of very interesting points there.

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I think we should keep in mind the very interesting distinction between the question does internet and social media,

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one, make protests more likely to make protest more likely to succeed once they have started?

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That was, I think, one of your points and three, as it were,

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the tipping point question between them being an asset to an opposition so long as it succeeds,

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but an asset to repression if it fails to reach the tipping point.

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And, you know, the first question that with that is, again, you have to look at the infrastructure that facilitates that protest.

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And here again, I mean, you know, companies like Facebook, Twitter and others, that infrastructure is a huge factor.

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And who owns that infrastructure?

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Which countries own that infrastructure, whether it's business or political decision shaping up, sort of structures crucial?

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I mean, that infrastructure doesn't come for free.

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Yeah, and that's different from the infrastructure of previous protest movements is different from fax machines.

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It's different from, you know, telephones and everything else.

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It's just this political economy is different and we have to keep that in mind.

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Brilliant job of actually Evgeny Morozov has established himself as the voice of the sceptical voice on the

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liberationist possibilities of the of off the net and for somebody who is Tim reminds us was born in Belarus in 1984.

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That's pretty good. Clearly I labour on the disadvantage of not being born in Minsk without an authoritarian education,

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and I think that maybe in Scotland it's tried his best, but even Dundee could never reach the level of Minsk.

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It's worth it. So the Gorske believe they made a film.

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Film some time ago now during the Cold War of Moscow was Gorky Park.

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I made a film and they shot it in Dundee because it was the closest city you can find that close to city you could find,

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which looked like Moscow in the 1980s. By the way, I want to pick.

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A number of things. I mean, a number of things that I agree with only Evgeny and and he too doesn't go around saying.

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I mean, he's often credited with saying that he doesn't believe that the net does anything at all.

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He doesn't believe that at all, of course.

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But I wanted to pick up some things that you're reading, some things he said last night when he was on on NEWSNIGHT last night.

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He's come to Oxford to get a bigger audience. Well, he said that smarter than I thought he was talking about Tunisia, the Tunisian revolution,

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which I think the moderator said had been called the WikiLeaks revolution, which is patently absurd.

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It was called so because one of the cables that was put out on WikiLeaks said

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that the diplomats in Tunisia had saw the Tunisian government as corrupt.

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And he commented that everyone knows everyone in Tunisia, knows everyone in Belarus, knows that the regime is corrupt.

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And I think that's an important point. Everyone knows point.

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Everyone does know. I think most people know, certainly in Russia and Belarus, like I'm sure in Tunisia, I guess knows that the regime is corrupt.

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But when you have something exact like a leak from a diplomatic cable,

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which is then put out on the Internet, or when as the more famous cable on the Internet,

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have it said that the diplomats in Saudi Arabia quoted the Saudi leadership as saying as asking the states to cut off the head of the snake.

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Now everybody knows, but which is often meant simply. Everybody in the know knows.

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That is, journalists, diplomats, people in the political sphere are actually not so much the general population.

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But when you know exactly what, assuming that the cable would be accurate, what the Saudi leadership thinks about,

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about the danger of Iran, then your knowledge is increased largely greatly.

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It becomes more exact as it comes down from the level of being vague and unfocused into something exact.

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And that obviously empowers a revolution, but it certainly empowers your own view of things.

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It empowers your opinion and your knowledge.

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And that, I think, is is one of the great advantages of revelations on the net, aided by social media and by Twitter and so on.

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Once that knowledge becomes more exact, once it's tied down to something exact, then the the information is more precious.

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So to dismiss it as you did last night as well,

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that's something everybody knows is only partially true when you know something more exactly when you have chapter and verse.

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This, after all, is what journalism fact based journalism its claim is.

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When you when you tie it down to facts, observable facts, sourced facts, then things change.

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The ability to hold governments to account seems to me to be one of the great advantages

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that the net has increased large increase for our trade for for for journalists trade.

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And to mention that I spent some years in Russia about four years ago, for example, if a staffer was in the audience and I wrote a challenge,

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one of the first challenges conflicts that the writer since you did on the Russian Internet and we found

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then the research was mainly floriana as we found then that the Russian into that was pretty mediocre.

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People on the net were having kind of fairly small minded quarrels with each other.

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It wasn't really an attempt to get out, to broaden it, and we thought it was called the web, but that failed.

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Now, four years later, it is succeeding much better.

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The Russian Internet is a place of real interest where bloggers, websites,

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political movements have come on and it is the place in a semi authoritarian media

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environment or semi authoritarian country where you find the best discussion,

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the best debate, the best commentary, and indeed sometimes the best news, the best fear information in in the Russian media.

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And that holding to account over time is developed over time is one of the great, I think,

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advantages of sure you can you wouldn't deny this, but I think it's worth saying that within an authoritarian system,

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which of course, can and does trap the people who go on to the Internet, who suborned something very often with,

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you know, with money and privileges and brings them with the Kremlin's items.

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A great deal of that is, he says, nevertheless, the the growth and the scope,

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the growing scope of the Russian Internet has been something remarkable in the last three or four years.

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And I would bet that. The ability of the regime to crack down on it is not as great as its ability to grow and grow and grow,

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especially as more and more people get get onto the net.

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His largest point today was that the net gives governments, give states,

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the authoritarian states regimes, the ability to track down, to find people who are protesting.

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And that is obviously the case. However, that's been the case of one has to put against that.

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That's been the case with authoritarian regimes for forever.

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As long as have been authoritarian regimes, they have tracked people down. It is, of course, much more sophisticated now.

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It can happen at a more sophisticated level, but then so can the resistance.

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So the two are both using the Internet, both abusing it as we would see it and using it, and actually they can.

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He referred to the speech by Secretary Clinton a few days ago, a few weeks ago, and she said this.

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She said that. And it wasn't a speech which was in line with, if you like, techno optimism, if not technological ism.

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And she said, we must also recognise that these techniques are not just an unmitigated blessing.

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These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress, and political rights are still to be used to build hospitals or on the other hand,

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machine guns, nuclear power to either energise the city or destroy it.

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The same networks that help organise movements for freedom also enable Al Qaeda to spew hatred.

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So there's a clear recognition on every side that the work that these technologies have, both the ability for good and evil.

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In his book, which is is a tremendously interesting and energetic book, The Net Delusion, he used the phrase which is which, which.

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Although the book is very well written, vividly written, it's still extra vivid.

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And it is a kind of expression of despair for such a young man.

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It was it was a shock to see it. He says that talking of his own fellow citizens or former fellow citizens,

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I think it was fellow Russians or perhaps people in the former Soviet Union generally says

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that they're that they've sunk into a bottomless a bottomless reservoir of spin and hedonism,

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which I think means that Belarus has got PR advice.

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I've got PR advice from from Tim Bell of Bell Pottinger, who used to advise the Conservative Party and still does advise the Conservative Party.

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And they go shopping in the car. And the two together, I think, are not a sign necessarily of great despair.

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You can both protest and have you care from Russia. You can protest against governments like our own, like the Western ones.

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We use public relations every hour of their lives.

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I, I do think that to to to suggest that that the populations in semi authoritarian countries in the post Soviet countries, even in Belarus,

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which is more authoritarian than most leaving aside by the Central Asians that to to suppose that the population

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there has now dropped out entirely and for the foreseeable future out of politics is is probably wrong.

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He's the Belarussian. I'm not.

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But I would I would bet that that hedonism, which by Western standards is fairly modest and even the public relations spin has its limits.

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And that be one of the factors of the increasing liberalisation in the right in Ukraine, in Russia and in Belarus,

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which which carries on at the same time as the as the regimes crack down or attempt to crack down.

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One of these is is due to the Internet, due to the ability of the Internet to create networks, to create discussion,

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to carry dissent, to carry dissent and be the tropes of dissent, people who have not before thought about it.

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And the more that these networks increase and in many countries, as in Iran and no doubt in Tunisia, they are fairly small at the moment.

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But as they increase, then that discussion and that debate,

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that courage of the themes of dissent and the ability simply to think of which many people may not have done,

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to think of opposition as a possible mental state before one gets to go out on the street.

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Is the the is the most precious gift. It's the social media, the Internet, blogs, websites and so on can give.

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As I say, none of this is foreign to what the have argues,

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but I think it's important when one hears him to also have in mind that this side of the Internet equation is important,

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remains important, and as well, I think can see both in Russia and even more in China,

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that's becoming more important and one would expect it to continue to do so.

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Thank you. Thank you very much, John. I want to give Evgeny a chance to respond briefly to that before throwing it open.

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Could I just add to John's last point, this question from your book, you have a powerful critique of technological determinism.

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Yes. But you also dismissed the notion that technology is neutral and you use the term from from the history of technology,

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that technologies have affordances.

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I think that's the term you use. Affordances, that is to say, they have they enable you to do certain things more easily and other things less easily.

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Do you think. But bottom line that the affordances of the technology of the Internet are.

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More empowering. More liberating or less? Mm hmm.

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Sure. So thanks, John, for your response.

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I'll just throw me out quickly. Stroke notes I've made. I was aghast. Two points with regards to the WikiLeaks evolution and Tunisia.

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Again, my, my, my only big issue with regards to this is how generalisable that is.

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Can we expect similar protests happen elsewhere based on what has been revealed by WikiLeaks?

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I'm not talking about the power of information to mobilise people.

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I really want to zoom in on the WikiLeaks, its model, its ideology, and its assumptions,

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because those will be the policy, the lesson drawn from calling it the WikiLeaks revolution.

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You know, the notion of, I think, you know, the best word, this political romanticism that Julian Assange,

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you know, runs on will gain much more weight if we call it the WikiLeaks revolution.

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So in no way am I denying the political power of information.

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I'm just trying to stop people from drawing conclusions about the success and effectiveness of WikiLeaks,

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the phenomenon and much here, I think, that counts on whether the country that is under cables is a U.S. satellite or not.

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In the case of Tunisia, the kind of revelations that happened, you know, show that the US doesn't support Tunisia to the extent that they claim.

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And you know, in the case of Belarus, which is not the U.S. satellite, which is not supported,

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I mean, the only revelations that are likely to happen when there is some American opposition.

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So, yeah, much care depends on politics. I just don't want for us to get carried away with the notion that, you know,

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we should expect similar things happening and contacts that have nothing to do with Tunisia.

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With regards to your idea about the Internet enabling some kind of a public sphere in countries like Russia,

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I mean, this is something I agree on with. I think you also have to remember that the government has been trying to engineer some kind of

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a public sphere of their own in Russia successfully for the last decade was government funded,

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then the government created the NGOs, was government created, you know, public chambers of intellectuals.

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I mean, all of that is happening. I think it has to be understood within the broader political and social terms of how much value a

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government like Kremlin's sees in having some kind of a quasi controlled public sphere in Russia.

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And this is where the power of the Internet will also kick in.

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If the things are having some kind of a public sphere is what they need to sustain their model of capitalism.

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You know, perhaps the Internet ban will just have an enabling role in that process with regards to,

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you know, you know, the power of the Internet in general.

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I think my interest in the book, in my interest,

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sort of my whole intellectual project is mostly to answer the question of how do draft policy when we just don't know.

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We don't have the conclusive proof that the Internet is helping either side.

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Right. And we are not going to have that answer for the next several centuries.

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So we still don't have I think some people are still not convinced that those are printing press revolution.

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I know some are still arguing in the Scarlett community. Right. So the question is, how can someone in the State Department or, you know,

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in Brussels or in London decide what to make of the potential of the Internet when they don't have the definitive answer?

404
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How do you act and how do draft policy in an environment of uncertainty where this is, by the way, how you draft, you know,

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all policies happen between advisors and here I think we really have to look at some of the

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underlying epistemological assumptions of how they're learning about the Internet and its impact.

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Who informs us? Whom do we get to hear? You know, if we only get to hear from secular and Western bloggers, the nature,

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we're likely to get a slightly one sided picture of the power of the Internet, the major.

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Right. So if we only hear from people from Silicon Valley who know everything about innovation and new media,

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they're are also likely to miss the potential of new media to change things in places like Russia,

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because arguably we need to know much more about Russia than about the Internet to know how the Internet affects Russia.

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It's so much about it evolves about building the right epistemological framework, actually building successful policy.

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And who should you listen to? What to what extent and how do we build those structures and the policy process into?

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Answer your question to me about affordances.

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There is actually a great debate within the design community where the notion of affordances comes from with, you know,

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some theories of design arguing that affordances are, you know, inherent in, you know,

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all technologies that, you know, they do not depend on the environment that that.

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You know, if you look at a pattern, it's affordances. You know, it is trite.

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So you do not see it as, you know, doing something else.

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And other people argue that the affordances depends on who is looking at the performance,

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depends on the particular environment in which this thing is to be used.

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So I think with the with regards to the Internet, I would not ascribe any of Portland,

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Stuart in general because I think I don't see anything helpful coming out of that discourse of us agreeing that the Internet is a democratising force,

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while in many environments it will prove to be the opposite. But again, my my interest here is driven by the question of policy and policymaking.

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And what kind of what kind of benefits can you derive from having this essentialist assumptions about the Internet,

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you know, having a certain the fact universally or having a certain affordances universally in here,

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I just do not see what we gain policy wise and rather starts with a very cynical Nicholas,

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the kind of position where, you know, I do not know affordances unless I examine the context.

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So you may start with a set of assumptions about how certain affordances may arise.

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And in context. And this, I think, is as far as we can go.