Internet, Democracy, and Internet Censorship in Authoritarian States

There have been three great technological revolutions in history. About 12,000 years ago, in the late Neolithic period, humans began to move from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones. Then 6,000 years ago they learned how to fashion metal tools and weapons during the so-called Bronze Age. About 300 years ago, the Industrial Revolution began, with the first early steam engines and textile mills, followed in due course by railroads, gasoline and electrical motors, nuclear power, and jet and rocket engines. All of these revolutions have "irreversibly altered the course of human history and fundamentally refashioned human societies" (McClellan and Dorn, 2006, p. 275). At the same time, there has been an intellectual and scientific revolution led by luminaries like Newton, Darwin, and Einstein that fundamentally changed humanity's view of the universe and its place within it.

In one sense, computers and the Internet are just a continuation of the communications revolution, starting with the printing press and then continuing with the telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, radio, and television. Could this be leading to a more fundamental change in history on the same level as the agricultural and industrial revolutions? This is a more problematic proposition. The idea of a post-industrial economy based on services and high technology dates back to the 1960s, although some visionaries had an inkling of it even in the nineteenth century. Skills and education that were valuable in an industrial economy have become obsolete in the new system, although this has happened before in the history of capitalism. In an economy and society increasingly based on virtual realities and interactions, there will certainly be some major changes in human culture and psychology (Barglow, 1994). Although today "no one would design a bridge or a large building without using computers," many people seem to forget that high-quality construction and engineering was accomplished without the benefit of computers fifty or one hundred years ago (Baase, 2009, p. 4).

People in the past could also socialize and communicate without the benefit of email and the Internet; they could obtain news without blogging, and consult encyclopedias without Wikipedia. Despite all the great increases in the speed and efficiency of communication, "citizens normally pursue a lifestyle that would be broadly recognizable to their ancestors 50 years earlier" (Walsham, p. 3). Apart from the computer industry, there has not been a new industrial revolution equivalent to that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its radical break from traditional agrarian society and the unprecedented changes in "food, clothing, housing, or transportation" (Agre, p. 5). Society has changed relatively little from the era before the computer age, with only a few exceptions, such as the use of computers to speed up financial transactions and in scientific efforts like the search for extraterrestrial life through SETI@Home and the determination of the human genome. On the Internet, "valuable and worthless [content is] indiscriminately mixed," with racist and pornographic websites among the most popular (Rosenberg, 2004, p. 18). In a society where more transactions were being carried out online, a new type of cybercriminal developed with the special skills necessary to steal electronically.

In the past thirty years, new technological developments in personal computing and the Internet were routinely heralded as opening up a liberal New World Order in which individuals and businesses would have free access to more information than ever before in history. Supposedly, these new technologies would be the death knell of repressive authoritarian and totalitarian regimes everywhere, and would open the door to a new liberal-democratic culture of global capitalism and universal human rights. In 1989–91, the fall of the Iron Curtain seemed to confirm that this new era was finally at hand. Needless to say, this has not happened, and authoritarian governments like those in Iran and China are well able to monitor, censor, and control the Internet. They may never be able to accomplish this perfectly and completely, but their powers of censorship, control, and intimidation of individual users and Internet companies are considerable indeed.

Some people — like the "self-explorers" described by Kinsman — have been at the cutting edge of experiencing the libertarian side of the new technology (Kinsman, 1990). On the other hand, inequality has actually increased during the new era of high technology and computers, both within and among nations. By the year 2000, just 358 billionaires had more wealth than the bottom half of the entire world's population combined, a concentration proportionally far greater than in 1960, or even the 1920s and 1890s (Walsham, p. 24). In Class Warfare in an Information Age, Michael Perlman made it clear that the age of high technology is hardly going to mean the end of social classes or class conflict. Distinctions between those who own and control the new technology versus those who work for them and consume their products will continue as always, and those who cannot afford to access the new technology will be relegated to lower-class status as well (Perlman, 2000). There is a growing gap between information and knowledge workers and those who still perform more traditional tasks.