“In the past, states used to torture to get this kind of data. Now, all they have to do is just get on Facebook.”
I’m amassing a summer reading list as a carrot (of sorts—there are many carrots) to help move me through the development process on a major project at work. On the nerdier end is Columbia law professor and ‘Net Neutrality’ term-coiner Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire; and journalist Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, both of which were recently—and very smartly—reviewed by Steve Coll in the New York Review of Books. Yesterday, Dissent’s Mark Engler weighed in on the subject with a piece, The Internet as a Tool for Repression, illustrated by RSA’s recent animation of a talk by Morozov.
I’ll withhold judgment until I read both books, but I do think that the level of performativity in this video is both striking and amusing—to me, Morosov is mirroring the super-hyperactive “up with Internet!” spirit so prevalent among cyber-Utopians which, as history (and human psychology … and politicians) suggests, is a more effective way to make bad news more palatable. LOLZ.
