Welcome to this event, which is jointly sponsored by the European Studies Centre, the DONDO Programme for the Study of Freedom,
the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Oxford University Project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics.
A subject today is does the Internet help people power?
The question posed already in relation to people power movements in Ukraine, Iran,
Burma, Belarus and of course, even as we speak, or least even as I speak in Tunisia.
And just to give you a get you in the mood. Let me give you.
Part of President Gadhafi's reaction to the role of the Internet in these events.
I quote, even you, my Tunisian brothers, you may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet.
A Kleenex is what Gadhafi calls WikiLeaks and this Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write it.
Do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner.
It can suck anything, any useless person, any lawyer, any drunkard, anyone high on drugs can talk on the internet.
And you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free show.
We become the victims of Facebook and Kleenex and YouTube.
No. Shall we become victims? The tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods.
Thus, the question of the day is posed by President Gadhafi.
I'm to pose a question and perhaps slightly more scholarly form.
We're delighted to have Katie Morozov and John Lloyd.
Evgeny Morozov was born in Belarus in 1984.
So he was clearly predestined to write about the Internet and dictatorships,
which he has done extremely originally, knowledgeably and provocatively in many places,
challenging what he calls the cyber utopianism characteristic, particularly of a certain US approach to these things.
And he's pulled this argument together in his book, which has just been published.
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.
And we're delighted that he's with us today to present his argument on the specific question.
Of does the Internet help or by implication, hinder people power?
Or more precisely, in what ways does it do the one or the other?
Am I? Respondent is John Lloyd, who is director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in this university,
extremely well known as one of this country's leading writers about analysts of journalism and the media,
but also someone who has written as a journalist from Russia for many years,
has written a book about Russia and therefore knows very well at least one of the
regional contexts which Evgeny Morozov is very familiar with and comes out of.
Evgeny will speak for no more than 20 minutes.
I have the internationally familiar language of the.
Yellow and red cards to control his time.
John will speak for no more than 10 minutes and there will be plenty of time for discussion.
And I should just mention that in the spirit of our subject, everything we say will soon be on the Internet.
On the Oxford University i-Tunes site.
Again, thank you so much.
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.
Maybe I should ask him instead of Gladwell for the next dark side book to do that.
But yes, let me tell you first about what this book is not about.
I'm not in any way denying the power of the Internet and social media to help people organise themselves.
I get to do the state's war campaign on their shirts that are political, the social that might be environmental.
All of that is happening. In all of that,
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.
It's not only about, you know, I come from Belarus.
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.
And that is George Soros,
this open society institute in I benefited from their scholarship to go study and eventually I joined the board of the information
program which actually spends a lot of time thinking how to use technology and new media to promote democratic and open society values.
So my interest in this is very pragmatic, actually.
I want the Internet to help.
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.
Like that's sad.
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.
It's also, in many contexts the power to track and identify dissidents and protesters.
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,
I think, very interesting differences in the way in which social media and the Internet could actually affect certain countries.
So what happened in Belarus was very interesting in the sense that the government on
the day of the election on December 19th said didn't shut down the entire Internet.
What they did was only to shut down one Internet protocol, you know, HDP, which basically is the secure version.
To put it very broadly, the secure version of the normal HDP protocol,
which is now used in all in most e-mail services in sites increasingly like Facebook and Twitter.
And what that basically did to anyone who wanted to use Internet in Belarus is that while some websites were available,
people couldn't get them to the email simply because email requires established protocol, right?
People couldn't get through social media like Twitter and Facebook because they too now increasingly demand tidbits for people to log in.
That happened for just, I think, six or 7 hours right before the polling booths closed.
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,
launched attacks on the websites of the opposition media, which were actually informing the people about the protests.
And so people could actually find out what was happening and where the protest were taking place,
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,
while they managed to redirect anyone who would visit an oppositional website to a page that was one day old.
So basically everyone who would visit that website would only see news from yesterday.
They wouldn't see all of the update of, you know, news published about the protests.
So and of course, most of those websites, city law, they knew that that would be happening and they relied on email.
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.
But of course, since the HDP protocol was down, they couldn't use email.
Also. So in a sense, they ended up without their website and without their backup system through
which they could actually inform all of their subscribers through mailing lists.
So the most disturbing part and that's the final part, the final bit I'll say about Belarus,
the most disturbing part was that there are now reports that the government is actually asking mobile operators
for details of everyone who had a mobile phone and was in the protest zone on the day of the protests.
Right. Again, the technology for that exists.
The mobile operators know who was where and when they could easily link, you know, the numbers to the names.
And the idea is that the government, you know, if they really want to,
they would go and start prosecuting the people who actually showed up at the protest.
Could I just clarify? They're asking the mobile phone operators.
Yes. Those are, you know, the people who, you know, run the mobile towers so they can actually triangulate who was where.
And this is technology that is available.
So this is the, you know, example of Belarus, where I think social media, of course,
that help to an extent to publicise what was happening the way reports on Twitter.
The darker side of things is that, you know,
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,
they're in that position in a much better position, I would argue,
than they were before social media to actually go and indentify who those people where.
And I think this is a very good distinction.
The same, by the way, to an extent happened in Iran, where the government also, after the protests died down,
turned to social media websites for evidence and for any hints of who where those protesters they would.
At some point, they posted photos that were initially posted to Flickr on the websites of the government run news agencies,
asking people to identify if they can recognise any of the faces in the photos.
There was, of course, also a lot of searching on sites like Facebook and Twitter, trying to identify,
you know, whether Iranians who are participating in the protests have any connections with foreigners.
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.
So the lesson that I learned from this is that, you know,
while social media can be extremely useful in publicising what's happening and then mobilising people, if the protest, you know,
topple the government and if the government stays in power, I guess their capacity to track down everyone who's participated,
who's been participating in the protest is greater than it has been in the past.
But this is one sad lesson that I draw from the events.
If you look at what happened in Tunisia recently, I think the situation is more optimistic now,
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.
If the government wanted to engage in acts of repression, they would have plenty of evidence and plenty of hands to identify.
You know, the people. Again, we can argue whether the people who are participating in the protests were fully aware of the risks.
Some of them probably where some of them were willing to go and, you know, sacrifice their lives, as we have seen in Tunisia.
However, I would like to urge you to go back to some of the initial assumptions about the promise of social media.
That promise was that it would actually be possible for this of the movements to tap into a new, you know, reserve force,
if you wish, of people power of people who are not yet, you know, dissidents themselves, people who are just on Facebook,
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,
you know, they don't think it's it's much to sign up to a Facebook group or send a Twitter message.
Right. So the problem, the early promise was that it would be possible to go beyond the dissidents and scale the protests.
So this is, I think, the criteria that we need to keep in mind.
It's not that, you know, it's just the dissidents, it's the broader movement.
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,
you know, in Facebook's privacy policy may actually affect the security of its users.
Looking at Tunisia, yeah, I think what I found very fascinating is that, you know,
just a week ago when, you know, the protests have been going on for something like City of Works,
the government was still bold and strong enough to actually go and hack into the email accounts of the activists and go and break,
you know, and start all sorts of scams on Facebook where they would also be able to get.
The user details, passwords and such of the users involved.
So if you look at Tunisia, the government's ability to control the Internet did not yet recur.
So again, if you look at the sort of political and social forces shaping what was happening, you know,
if they turn the other way and the government stayed in power and Ben Ali stayed,
and they really wanted to go and really engage in crackdowns and the depression.
I think they could have you know, the technology was there and the ability was there.
They were recording everything, as they said, there was still breaking into the accounts of the dissidents and bloggers up until the very end.
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,
I think partly reflects and supports.
My sense is that there is just too much hype and excitement about the power of the Internet.
If you look at some of the commentary in the American media and particularly American mainstream
blogosphere like Andrew Sullivan and others who are touting the Twitter revolution in Iran,
they're now also touting the WikiLeaks revolution in Tunisia.
And there is nothing wrong with trying to understand the contribution that WikiLeaks has made to the events in the media.
And probably it played some role, if not in telling Tunisians that their government is corrupt, corrupt, which of course, most of them knew.
But at least I'm telling them that this may not be enjoying the support of the American government any longer.
So on that level, it may have had some impact.
It may have also made an impact in terms of revealing that, you know what everyone knew.
Right. There is this interesting insight and collective, you know,
action serious that it's not just what you know is that, you know, you should know what others know.
So once everyone knew of the same things, you know, probably they were more likely to act collectively.
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,
cyber top end is on top, you end up thinking that, you know, WikiLeaks is bound to produce similar outcomes in other countries.
Well, Twitter's produce is likely to produce similar outcomes in other countries.
So there is this deterministic narrative, which is often the better than our,
you know, understanding or what the Twitter or Facebook or WikiLeaks revolution is.
And I think this is the wrong deterministic narrative.
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.
In the case of Belarus,
they were actually Lukashenka in one of his speeches immediately after the elections mentioned WikiLeaks six times ahead of his speech.
And, you know, the reason why he does so is because the only things that WikiLeaks cables
can reveal is that America is supporting the opposition movement in Belarus,
which for Lukashenka is great because it helps him today militarised the
opposition and to basically weaken them and portray them as agents of the West.
So what happens in Belarus in the last two weeks is that they actually appeared,
the cables that were not published by WikiLeaks originally and were not published by The Guardian,
but they were published by media, affiliated with the state, documenting how the American government is smuggling money to the Belarussian opposition.
Right. And I can assure you that it didn't help the prospects of democratisation in Belarus.
Right. So again, we have to be very careful about, you know, labelling anything.
And that's part of my argument. We have to be very careful about labelling anything.
It's a Twitter, WikiLeaks or Facebook revolution, in part because social media does not have the same deterministic effect everywhere.
And the most conditions,
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.
So how much time ahead?
About 7 minutes. Okay. So what else do the governments, though, beyond, you know, just tracking what people are doing?
And I think this also is very important to understand because my my interest in the book and I know that you
want to talk more about people power with my interest in the book is what happens between the protests right.
And then what happens between the situation. People are mobilised.
If you do assume that social media and the Internet is making protest more effective, to some extent,
you also have to evaluate whether the Internet and social media is actually making the protest more likely to begin with.
And this is the second question that interests me much more than the first one, because I think the first one is more.
Like question of economics. Yes. Social media reduces costs of collective action.
It makes coordination easier. It makes access to information easier.
I mean, all of that to me seems pretty clear. And it's not thriller shape all that much, but the political situation.
The second question, whether the protest is becoming less likely,
even though it is becoming more effective, I think is a much more challenging question.
And here you really have to look beyond the power of mobilisation and look at
how the governments themselves are using social media for their own purposes.
I think it differs from country to country, but here you do have to look at things like how social media facilitate surveillance.
You do have to look at things like how social media facilitates the production of propaganda and
how the even mode of propaganda is different in social media than it is in traditional media.
I mean, I look at the country like Russia where, you know,
there are a lot of very interesting new media in 13 years and new media groups who are all there knowledgeable about the Internet.
They have been online since 1995. In some cases, they are, you know, the pioneers of the Russian Internet.
Many of them ended up working for the Kremlin, running a pro-government conservative.
You know, news sites, social media sites and building new media empires, which contributed a little to the democratisation in Russia.
And to me, this is a much more challenging political and social question,
because here, if you really want to draw conclusions about the power of the Internet,
you really have to examine every country and look at how the governments with their own
existing political and social agendas are shaping the Internet according to their own needs.
My problem with having many people in Washington, I enthusiastically embrace the power of the Internet.
And as you may have noticed in the last 12 months,
they haven't really a grasp on this front with Hillary Clinton delivering a very high profile speech about Internet freedom with,
you know, a lot of American politicians speaking up about it is that they lose sight of the fact that,
you know, America is not neutral for this debate.
America has its own domestic agenda with regards to the power of the Internet and with regards to minimising the
damage caused by sites like WikiLeaks and caused by Internet piracy and caused by the threat of cyber warfare.
All of that points away from Internet freedom as such.
And on the second level, you have another concern, which I think most politicians and decision makers in America don't have air of,
which is that much of this protest, much of this mobilisation is facilitated by American companies,
facilitated by third parties, facilitated by Facebook. It's facilitated by, you know, in some cases, Google and Skype.
And all of them are, as we know, American companies and are when they facilitate political change.
It backfires on American companies and on the American government,
particularly when the American government explicitly endorses Twitter revolution in Iran and,
you know, makes much to sort of create this impression that they were somehow tinkering
with what was happening during the protests when they famously reached out.
So my argument here is that it's very hard for America to keep an honest face here, because on the one hand,
they themselves domestically are cracking down on many of these companies because they want more surveillance power to, you know, for law enforcement.
They want more control towards situations like WikiLeaks, which, of course,
then is being exploited by the governments and Russia and China and Iran, where they point to the the publicity of the American government.
And what they want to do is to replace many of this American players with the local domestic ones.
Right. So here again,
we will soon be seeing a transition from much of this protest being facilitated by American companies and European companies to some extent,
who have much better rules and standards when it comes to freedom of expression.
They just respect the users more. You know, they have more transparent mechanisms of how they deal with protest.
You know, if you set up a Facebook group that wants to challenge established cultural,
you know, Moors and, you know, Pakistan or, you know, Iran or Russia or China,
chances are your group is more likely to survive on the local social networking site if that site is American,
if that site is local, in part because it's just much easier for the local governments to pressure this companies.
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.
The Internet, you know, as it is dominated by American players without having you know,
without making any controversial remarks about Internet theorem, Twitter revolutions and such or, you know, very,
very aggressively go after the subjects and potentially risk that all of this companies and services will be replaced by local players,
and they will be replaced by local players that are less than countries like Russia and China, simply because they have this.
They're sitting in piles of cash.
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.
Right. And we will be seeing an increased connection between this debates, whether, you know, by those should be allowed to send,
you know, cars taking photos of American cities and towns the way Google wants to go around China,
making, you know, photos of Chinese cities and towns and all of those debates about trade,
about, you know, some of them will be about national security.
They will be affecting the power of many of this Web sites to affect social change and to be used for activism.
So, you know, some of the arguments I'm making in the book is simply trying to draw attention to
the factors that will be that will be shaping the power of this web in the future.
I mean, even if they have been the fact that up until now, which is something I do not necessarily deny,
we have to be extremely careful about preserving that possibility for the future and making those websites
less susceptible to tracking surveillance and many of the other factors that they outlined at the beginning.
So the key takeaway message is that it's it's it's all in flux.
The social media landscape, I think, is changing tremendously.
It's being shaped by forces that are most decision makers who speak enthusiastically
about Internet freedom and Twitter revolutions do not fully understand.
And I think we have to be very cautious about setting expectations on subjects like Internet freedom in the foreign context,
so high that our own domestic, you know, mistakes will cost us dearly and make us look extremely duplicitous.
The thing I'll stop here and I hope we will have some good going.
Thank you very much, Evgeny. Laying out the argument very clearly. A lot of very interesting points there.
I think we should keep in mind the very interesting distinction between the question does internet and social media,
one, make protests more likely to make protest more likely to succeed once they have started?
That was, I think, one of your points and three, as it were,
the tipping point question between them being an asset to an opposition so long as it succeeds,
but an asset to repression if it fails to reach the tipping point.
And, you know, the first question that with that is, again, you have to look at the infrastructure that facilitates that protest.
And here again, I mean, you know, companies like Facebook, Twitter and others, that infrastructure is a huge factor.
And who owns that infrastructure?
Which countries own that infrastructure, whether it's business or political decision shaping up, sort of structures crucial?
I mean, that infrastructure doesn't come for free.
Yeah, and that's different from the infrastructure of previous protest movements is different from fax machines.
It's different from, you know, telephones and everything else.
It's just this political economy is different and we have to keep that in mind.
Brilliant job of actually Evgeny Morozov has established himself as the voice of the sceptical voice on the
liberationist possibilities of the of off the net and for somebody who is Tim reminds us was born in Belarus in 1984.
That's pretty good. Clearly I labour on the disadvantage of not being born in Minsk without an authoritarian education,
and I think that maybe in Scotland it's tried his best, but even Dundee could never reach the level of Minsk.
It's worth it. So the Gorske believe they made a film.
Film some time ago now during the Cold War of Moscow was Gorky Park.
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,
which looked like Moscow in the 1980s. By the way, I want to pick.
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.
I mean, he's often credited with saying that he doesn't believe that the net does anything at all.
He doesn't believe that at all, of course.
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.
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,
which I think the moderator said had been called the WikiLeaks revolution, which is patently absurd.
It was called so because one of the cables that was put out on WikiLeaks said
that the diplomats in Tunisia had saw the Tunisian government as corrupt.
And he commented that everyone knows everyone in Tunisia, knows everyone in Belarus, knows that the regime is corrupt.
And I think that's an important point. Everyone knows point.
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.
But when you have something exact like a leak from a diplomatic cable,
which is then put out on the Internet, or when as the more famous cable on the Internet,
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.
Now everybody knows, but which is often meant simply. Everybody in the know knows.
That is, journalists, diplomats, people in the political sphere are actually not so much the general population.
But when you know exactly what, assuming that the cable would be accurate, what the Saudi leadership thinks about,
about the danger of Iran, then your knowledge is increased largely greatly.
It becomes more exact as it comes down from the level of being vague and unfocused into something exact.
And that obviously empowers a revolution, but it certainly empowers your own view of things.
It empowers your opinion and your knowledge.
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.
Once that knowledge becomes more exact, once it's tied down to something exact, then the the information is more precious.
So to dismiss it as you did last night as well,
that's something everybody knows is only partially true when you know something more exactly when you have chapter and verse.
This, after all, is what journalism fact based journalism its claim is.
When you when you tie it down to facts, observable facts, sourced facts, then things change.
The ability to hold governments to account seems to me to be one of the great advantages
that the net has increased large increase for our trade for for for journalists trade.
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,
one of the first challenges conflicts that the writer since you did on the Russian Internet and we found
then the research was mainly floriana as we found then that the Russian into that was pretty mediocre.
People on the net were having kind of fairly small minded quarrels with each other.
It wasn't really an attempt to get out, to broaden it, and we thought it was called the web, but that failed.
Now, four years later, it is succeeding much better.
The Russian Internet is a place of real interest where bloggers, websites,
political movements have come on and it is the place in a semi authoritarian media
environment or semi authoritarian country where you find the best discussion,
the best debate, the best commentary, and indeed sometimes the best news, the best fear information in in the Russian media.
And that holding to account over time is developed over time is one of the great, I think,
advantages of sure you can you wouldn't deny this, but I think it's worth saying that within an authoritarian system,
which of course, can and does trap the people who go on to the Internet, who suborned something very often with,
you know, with money and privileges and brings them with the Kremlin's items.
A great deal of that is, he says, nevertheless, the the growth and the scope,
the growing scope of the Russian Internet has been something remarkable in the last three or four years.
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,
especially as more and more people get get onto the net.
His largest point today was that the net gives governments, give states,
the authoritarian states regimes, the ability to track down, to find people who are protesting.
And that is obviously the case. However, that's been the case of one has to put against that.
That's been the case with authoritarian regimes for forever.
As long as have been authoritarian regimes, they have tracked people down. It is, of course, much more sophisticated now.
It can happen at a more sophisticated level, but then so can the resistance.
So the two are both using the Internet, both abusing it as we would see it and using it, and actually they can.
He referred to the speech by Secretary Clinton a few days ago, a few weeks ago, and she said this.
She said that. And it wasn't a speech which was in line with, if you like, techno optimism, if not technological ism.
And she said, we must also recognise that these techniques are not just an unmitigated blessing.
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,
machine guns, nuclear power to either energise the city or destroy it.
The same networks that help organise movements for freedom also enable Al Qaeda to spew hatred.
So there's a clear recognition on every side that the work that these technologies have, both the ability for good and evil.
In his book, which is is a tremendously interesting and energetic book, The Net Delusion, he used the phrase which is which, which.
Although the book is very well written, vividly written, it's still extra vivid.
And it is a kind of expression of despair for such a young man.
It was it was a shock to see it. He says that talking of his own fellow citizens or former fellow citizens,
I think it was fellow Russians or perhaps people in the former Soviet Union generally says
that they're that they've sunk into a bottomless a bottomless reservoir of spin and hedonism,
which I think means that Belarus has got PR advice.
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.
And they go shopping in the car. And the two together, I think, are not a sign necessarily of great despair.
You can both protest and have you care from Russia. You can protest against governments like our own, like the Western ones.
We use public relations every hour of their lives.
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,
which is more authoritarian than most leaving aside by the Central Asians that to to suppose that the population
there has now dropped out entirely and for the foreseeable future out of politics is is probably wrong.
He's the Belarussian. I'm not.
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.
And that be one of the factors of the increasing liberalisation in the right in Ukraine, in Russia and in Belarus,
which which carries on at the same time as the as the regimes crack down or attempt to crack down.
One of these is is due to the Internet, due to the ability of the Internet to create networks, to create discussion,
to carry dissent, to carry dissent and be the tropes of dissent, people who have not before thought about it.
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.
But as they increase, then that discussion and that debate,
that courage of the themes of dissent and the ability simply to think of which many people may not have done,
to think of opposition as a possible mental state before one gets to go out on the street.
Is the the is the most precious gift. It's the social media, the Internet, blogs, websites and so on can give.
As I say, none of this is foreign to what the have argues,
but I think it's important when one hears him to also have in mind that this side of the Internet equation is important,
remains important, and as well, I think can see both in Russia and even more in China,
that's becoming more important and one would expect it to continue to do so.
Thank you. Thank you very much, John. I want to give Evgeny a chance to respond briefly to that before throwing it open.
Could I just add to John's last point, this question from your book, you have a powerful critique of technological determinism.
Yes. But you also dismissed the notion that technology is neutral and you use the term from from the history of technology,
that technologies have affordances.
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.
Do you think. But bottom line that the affordances of the technology of the Internet are.
More empowering. More liberating or less? Mm hmm.
Sure. So thanks, John, for your response.
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.
Again, my, my, my only big issue with regards to this is how generalisable that is.
Can we expect similar protests happen elsewhere based on what has been revealed by WikiLeaks?
I'm not talking about the power of information to mobilise people.
I really want to zoom in on the WikiLeaks, its model, its ideology, and its assumptions,
because those will be the policy, the lesson drawn from calling it the WikiLeaks revolution.
You know, the notion of, I think, you know, the best word, this political romanticism that Julian Assange,
you know, runs on will gain much more weight if we call it the WikiLeaks revolution.
So in no way am I denying the political power of information.
I'm just trying to stop people from drawing conclusions about the success and effectiveness of WikiLeaks,
the phenomenon and much here, I think, that counts on whether the country that is under cables is a U.S. satellite or not.
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.
And you know, in the case of Belarus, which is not the U.S. satellite, which is not supported,
I mean, the only revelations that are likely to happen when there is some American opposition.
So, yeah, much care depends on politics. I just don't want for us to get carried away with the notion that, you know,
we should expect similar things happening and contacts that have nothing to do with Tunisia.
With regards to your idea about the Internet enabling some kind of a public sphere in countries like Russia,
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
a public sphere of their own in Russia successfully for the last decade was government funded,
then the government created the NGOs, was government created, you know, public chambers of intellectuals.
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
government like Kremlin's sees in having some kind of a quasi controlled public sphere in Russia.
And this is where the power of the Internet will also kick in.
If the things are having some kind of a public sphere is what they need to sustain their model of capitalism.
You know, perhaps the Internet ban will just have an enabling role in that process with regards to,
you know, you know, the power of the Internet in general.
I think my interest in the book, in my interest,
sort of my whole intellectual project is mostly to answer the question of how do draft policy when we just don't know.
We don't have the conclusive proof that the Internet is helping either side.
Right. And we are not going to have that answer for the next several centuries.
So we still don't have I think some people are still not convinced that those are printing press revolution.
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,
in Brussels or in London decide what to make of the potential of the Internet when they don't have the definitive answer?
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,
all policies happen between advisors and here I think we really have to look at some of the
underlying epistemological assumptions of how they're learning about the Internet and its impact.
Who informs us? Whom do we get to hear? You know, if we only get to hear from secular and Western bloggers, the nature,
we're likely to get a slightly one sided picture of the power of the Internet, the major.
Right. So if we only hear from people from Silicon Valley who know everything about innovation and new media,
they're are also likely to miss the potential of new media to change things in places like Russia,
because arguably we need to know much more about Russia than about the Internet to know how the Internet affects Russia.
It's so much about it evolves about building the right epistemological framework, actually building successful policy.
And who should you listen to? What to what extent and how do we build those structures and the policy process into?
Answer your question to me about affordances.
There is actually a great debate within the design community where the notion of affordances comes from with, you know,
some theories of design arguing that affordances are, you know, inherent in, you know,
all technologies that, you know, they do not depend on the environment that that.
You know, if you look at a pattern, it's affordances. You know, it is trite.
So you do not see it as, you know, doing something else.
And other people argue that the affordances depends on who is looking at the performance,
depends on the particular environment in which this thing is to be used.
So I think with the with regards to the Internet, I would not ascribe any of Portland,
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,
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.
And what kind of what kind of benefits can you derive from having this essentialist assumptions about the Internet,
you know, having a certain the fact universally or having a certain affordances universally in here,
I just do not see what we gain policy wise and rather starts with a very cynical Nicholas,
the kind of position where, you know, I do not know affordances unless I examine the context.
So you may start with a set of assumptions about how certain affordances may arise.
And in context. And this, I think, is as far as we can go.