FOR wizened cyberpunks, it is a seemingly timeless debate: does the internet inherently promote openness and democracy, or can it just as easily strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes? A decade ago Andrew Shapiro’s book “The Control Revolution” argued the former, while Shanthi Kalathil’s and Taylor Boas’s tome “Open Networks, Closed Regimes” dissented. This week sees the publication of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom” by Evgeny Morozov, which sides with the pessimists.
The argument usually ends in a stalemate of competing anecdotes. Street protests organised by mobile text messages successfully oust Philippine President Joseph Estrada in 2001; Iran’s supposedly Twitter-powered Green Movement gets quashed in 2009. And so on. Clay Shirky, one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the internet, who has previously sided with cyber-utopian optimists, has now elegantly squared the circle by establishing an intellectual framework to consider the topic in “The Political Power of Social Media”, an article in the current Foreign Affairs. (Users must register to access the complete essay, but it is free.) Mr Shirky’s essay makes three principal contributions to the debate.