The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On Epistemology in Democracy

Global experience over the last decade is clear: internet social technology poses a far greater threat to democracies than it does to the world’s authoritarian regimes. Morozov was one of the first to recognize this as a likely possibility years before Donald Trump executed his coup of the American Republican Party and Vladimir Putin mounted his successful cyber-attack on the US elections.

The prevailing wisdom before Twitter and Facebook and the virtually infinite blogosphere was that the free flow of information and opinion was a path not just to factual general truth about the world but to the specific truth of liberal democracy. The internet was “Radio Free Europe on steroids.” Information that was ‘dis-intermediated’ from the interference of government and the constraints of cost would, it was presumed, promote massive popular unrest and lead to “regime change from within.” The Fukuyama thesis that a global liberal/capitalist society was inevitable would be realized.

This sort of “cyber-Utopianism” not only misunderstands the technology of the internet, it also misunderstands the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy and the interests of corporate capital. Democratic states are only formally constructed on constitutions. What matters practically in their functioning is a complex network of institutions - the press and other news media, political parties, lobbyists, and technical experts from the corporate world and academia to name only a few. Elections and their protocols are largely the result of how these other pivotal institutions function (or don’t), not the other way round. We depend upon them to filter, and sift, and verify what purport to be facts of the world.

But the internet has a major institutional advantage over these traditional sources of public information: cost. Social apps are private and commercially developed. Bloggers get sponsors or produce their editorials for nothing. It looks therefore like the perfect link between corporate capitalism and liberal democracy. The flaw in this train of thought is that corporate commerciality has little interest in the distinction between fact and fiction. What sells, sells. To put the matter succinctly: truth has precisely zero commercial value.

By by-passing other institutions, the internet eliminates the myriad of epistemological checks and balances that exist in a democratic culture. Trump’s Twitter feed is unedited and doesn’t come packaged with editorial comment, except for his own. The man is his own ‘trusted source.’ His followers are willing customers who have been conditioned by a lifetime of sophisticated advertising to accept self-serving assertions as statements of fact. Twitter has no interest in the veracity of his tweets, just their effect on the size of their customer base.

And as Russian and Chinese hackers have demonstrated beyond doubt, fake news can be inserted freely into technological networks for many purposes other than self-promotion. The absence of epistemological filtering means that all ideas and opinions are equal. In fact, the more outrageous, the more popular, and therefore the more commercial, the higher commercial value they have. The internet is not Radio Free Europe on steroids; it is The National Enquirer delivered to every house and on every billboard in the country. Whatever tendency there is in the United States to believe in conspiracies - from Communists under the bed to fluoride diluting natural essences - has been magnified by orders of magnitude.

I’m not competent to know whether Morozov’s suggestions for overcoming the epistemological nakedness of the net are sensible. Or even if they are still relevant after our experience during the 8 years since his book was published. What is clear, however, is that very few technological or sociological pundits have a clue about the likely impact of technology, especially its impact on political systems. That, and that there are a lot more surprises in store.

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