Web of tyrants

Even those who are wary of the utopianism the net has generated tend to take it for granted that the new communications technologies have saved us from the need to worry about censorship. Sceptics fear that the web provides us with too much information, not too little. Enthusiasts see a future of unlimited free speech when all the old arguments about libel, official secrecy and blasphemy become redundant.

To see how far the consensus spreads look at Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, a new collection of the views of 150 of the world’s leading minds on the technological revolution. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Research, speaks for the sceptical. He turns off his computer when he needs to think. Like Nicholas Carr — whose essay ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?’ infuriated Silicon Valley — he finds that the restless interruptions of working online have added to the ‘world’s attention deficit disorder’. The net’s dismal achievement has been to reduce furthermore our collective attention span ‘from the depths to which television brought it’.

All bracingly iconoclastic. However when Tegmark turns to freedom of speech, he is as sure as the most wide-eyed cyber-utopian that it will flourish online. ‘Once the cat is out of the bag and in the cloud, that’s it,’ he says. ‘Today it’s hard even for Iran and China to prevent information dissemination… The only currently reliable censorship is not to allow the internet at all, like in North Korea’.

The area of classic political censorship

Even in the area of classic political censorship, the net is a Janus-faced research. I have had the honour of getting to know dissidents from Syria, Iran and Belarus over the past year. Not one of them would abolish the net if they could. They know from hard-won experience that all the claims of the boosters about it permitting the subversion of authoritarian hierarchies by allowing anyone to write at virtually no cost are true. Clearly they are. The only way for a regime to stop all dissent now is to become like North Korea.

But the computing technologies remain double-edged, and not only because they allow dictatorships, democratic governments, spies and criminals new tools to collect information on a scale beyond the dreams of the secret police forces of the 20th century. The net gives writers the illusion of unrestricted freedom and at that time mockingly denies them the power that makes freedom effective.