by Evgeny MorozovIn 1989 Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”; later, Bill Clinton compared Internet censorship to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”; and in 1999 George W. Bush (not John Lennon) asked us to “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread.”Such starry-eyed cyber-optimism suggested a new form of technological determinism according to which the Internet would be the hammer to nail all global problems, from economic development in Africa to threats of transnational terrorism in the Middle East. Even so shrewd an operator as Rupert Murdoch yielded to the digital temptation: “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” he claimed. Soon after, Murdoch bowed down to the Chinese authorities, who threatened his regional satellite TV business in response to this headline-grabbing statement.
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/morozov.php
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