POWER has always meant an ability to observe, conceal, and even conceal oneself. Seeing implies social control; generally, to the extent that the possibilities of observation are increased, the likelihood of being seen decreases. That is why power has always come with the construction of watchtowers and observatories, or with increased sophistication of society’s observation techniques, like censuses and polls.
The search for power still motivates people in the world today and may even have improved the techniques of control, but in a knowledge and information society, the technology that makes these observational operations possible is equally at the disposal of the people being observed. Foucault (1975, 220) linked the exercise of power to continual individual vigilance; the reequilibrium that is currently taking place has to do with the fact that there is an increase in citizen supervision of the authorities and the technological ability to carry it out. What we have is a type of “civic panopticism” that has reversed the exercise of the discipline. The authorities play the role of passive subjects more than active observers, and citizens have gone from being mere spectators to distrustful guards. The space of new technologies is superimposed over traditional public space, meaning that the political scene is now under more observation, from up close and at every possible angle.
Representative democracy presumed an unequal ability between those who govern and those who are governed, but when information or general education is increased, this no longer holds true. In advanced societies, those who govern make themselves more vulnerable and dependent (Rosanvallon 2008, 61). Communication and information technologies make possible a democratic vigilance that was unthinkable at times of informational asymmetry. “The old mechanisms of government don’t work in a society where citizens live in the same information environment as those in power over them” (Giddens 2002, 75). The observational society is a more vigilant society, which presents new demands for transparency, but it must learn to manage those open informational environments where the problem is no longer concealment as much as the interpretation of reality.
WE, THE GATECRASHERS
Any society that has become democratized creates a corresponding public space, in other words, it becomes an environment where there are new ideas about observation, vigilance, the desire for transparency, debate, and control. That is what happened when the nation-states emerged, and something analogous is taking place now with global space. In both cases, there is the hope of creating a center of free debate and publicity that will lead to public diplomacy and nourish and solicit public opinion. The analogy is only partially valid, and there is no use in thinking about global governance with the same categories that apply to the limited space of nation-states. There is no doubt that something very similar to a global public space is slowly taking shape because of the confluence between communicative possibilities and the spread of democratic values.
The phenomenon of WikiLeaks is an indication that the geostrategic and diplomatic corps is in no position to halt publication or to remain protected within the secrecy that had been their milieu until now. This does not mean that secrets or discretion will be completely abolished from world diplomacy, but they are being reduced because of the creation of an observational society that has at its disposal more and more instruments to discover what is taking place in the secret corridors of power. This process is the result of the unstoppable insertion of societies into the political scene.
Diplomacy, which has been a reserved space, a dominium of secrets, the last bastion for reasons of state, a space of immunity, the last refuge in the face of the assaults of democratization, is now found besieged by what we could call a right for societies to observe international affairs. We are moving toward a form of public diplomacy that breaks away from the traditional idea of secrets. By emerging on the international scene, societies modify diplomatic strategies in profound ways. From the beginning, internationalization presumes the growing visibility of social questions.
In a world where everyone sees one another, where everyone compares themselves, borders lose their capacity for delimitation and discretion. Societies do not only intervene with their respective governments; these convergences also place global spaces under social vigilance. The process of constructing the global public space can be understood, negatively, as a process by which subjects free themselves from the framework of the state. Social behaviors increasingly escape the framework of national socialization: opinions, values, likes and dislikes, investments, and behaviors are articulated beyond traditional institutional framing. We find ourselves in the midst of a series of dynamics whose complexity and interdependence are largely determined by the fact that “cross-cutting” structures, diverse actors, and furtive interests are all in play. This allows us to conclude that the concept of “us” that the states articulate does not correspond with social and economic realities.
The process of configuring a global public space points to the formation of a new subject, global humanity, which is the final judge of political practices. Because of globalization, the world has become a publicly observed space. Nonconformist dynamics have led societies to enter into international political debate. The global public space has created conditions that are expressed and addressed. Of course, we should not get our hopes too high. The opinion that appears on the international scene is not the ideal antiestablishment movement, an effective force that can challenge the power of the states. The supervisory function of societies barely prevents—there is no veto—but it does reconfigure the international game to the point of making arbitrariness extremely costly. This intrusion and vigilance already challenge the power game itself or the value of ignorance, which authorities have found very useful (Badie 2004). Fifteen million people took to the streets in February 2003. They did not manage to prevent the war in Iraq, but they contributed decisively to delegitimizing it. Up-to-date knowledge of “foreign affairs” is the first step to open these matters to debate where anyone can take a side without needing government approval or patriotic alignment. We live in a world that rejects the excuse of the secret, that would prefer to profoundly modify the sense of diplomacy in order to insert it into public discussion.
International politics has long benefited from the value of ignorance. States could allow themselves almost anything when what they were doing was barely known. The Soviet army coup in Budapest in 1956 met with less resistance than the coup twelve years later in Prague. There was television in European homes by that point, and the image of the tanks deployed by the Warsaw Pact nations helped forge the beginning of international public opinion. In recent years, the idea of a public diplomacy that could replace old secretive practices with marketing that would court public opinion has become more popular. This change of strategy corresponds to the fact that power is being actively observed by eagerly solicited opinion. It is increasingly more difficult to appeal to democracy without looking for the support of public opinion, without agreeing to abandon a part of one’s own power to the game of collective deliberation.
The twentieth century has ended the monopoly that states enjoyed in their role as the only international actors. Such denationalization corresponds to the creation of a public space of free discussion and compromise at the heart of which we are all witnesses to genocides, law breaking, oppression of every kind, inequality, and so on. Globalization is also a space for public attention that notably reduces the distances between witnesses and actors, between responsible parties and spectators, between oneself and everyone else. New transnational communities of protest and solidarity are configured in this way. The new actors, to the extent that they watch and denounce, continue to destabilize the authorities’ capacity to impose themselves in a coercive fashion. No state is the owner of its image. Observational society participates directly in the debate that the global public space founds and acts in the name of a universal legitimacy. In this way, no state can neuter the gaze that studies it. The turn taken in the discussion of international penal justice is very meaningful in this regard: we are moving from a system of justice dictated in the name of the people to a justice that appeals to humanity. The states’ new international responsibility responds to the fact that humanity increasingly imposes itself as a reference to international action.
LIMITS TO TRANSPARENCY
The sign of our times is immediacy. Nothing is more suspicious to us than mediations, intermediaries, constructions, and representations. We think that if the facts are on hand we will know the truth, that democracy’s only requirement is to have nothing impeding us from making a decision. In our collective unconsciousness (we also sometimes formulate this explicitly), we consider information more useful than interpretations and, by the same prejudice, we tend to believe it is more democratic to participate than to delegate. A similar lack of confidence in mediation leads us to automatically presume that things are true when they are transparent, that representation always falsifies, and that every secret is illegitimate. There is nothing worse than an intermediary. That is why we immediately feel closer to someone who leaks information than to a journalist, to an amateur than to a professional, to NGOs than to governments. For this reason, our greatest scorn is aimed at those who imply the greatest degree of mediation: as opinion polls remind us, our greatest problem is—the political class. At the rate we are going, it will also end up that their pensions are the cause of the economic crisis. The current fascination with social networks, participation, and proximity reveals that the only utopia still standing is disintermediation.
With this state of affairs, no one should have been surprised that WikiLeaks is viewed as a confirmation of what we already knew: that the system is terrible and that we are innocent. This coincides in time with an economic crisis whose commentators have been repeating for some time now that it is being paid for by those of us who did not cause it. Fortunately, we are not a part of the market that is dedicated to conspiring and attacking. Now that the problems have been identified and the responsibilities assigned, we have saved ourselves nearly the entire task of conceiving of a complex world and adapting democracy to new realities. Indignation can continue comfortably replacing reflection and democratic effort.
Transparency is, without a doubt, one of the principal democratic values. It allows citizens to control the activity of their elected representatives, to verify respect for legal procedures, to understand decision-making processes, and to trust political institutions. Thanks to the Internet, this transparency can be expanded in a new fashion since the data can be made public in a direct and anonymous fashion. However, are we so certain that having free access to 250,000 documents from American diplomacy makes us more intelligent and better democratic citizens? Would we know more about the world if all secrets were suppressed? Are we made into better citizens as we go about discovering the extent to which many of our authorities are clumsy and cynical?
We should not allow ourselves to be carried away by the idea that we are in a world where information is available, transparent, and secret-free. In the first place, because we are aware that certain successful past negotiations would not have taken place if they had been broadcast live. There is something that we could call the diplomatic benefits of nontransparency. Of course, in this arena, many traditional procedures are destined to disappear, and anyone who participates in a diplomatic process from now on must be aware that almost everything will end up coming to light. But it is also true that the demand for total transparency may often paralyze public action. There are compromises that cannot be achieved out in the open. Too much light can tend to make actors radicalize their positions. In spite of certain hurried celebrations of a forthcoming world without duplicity or shadows, the distinction between being on or off stage continues to be necessary for politics.
But there is also an ambiguity to naked, noncontextualized transparency. It is an illusion to think that making facts public is enough to make truth rule in politics, the authorities come clean, and citizens understand what is really going on. In addition to access to public data, there is the question of its meaning. Placing large quantities of data and documents on the Internet is not enough to make public action intelligible: they need to be interpreted, the conditions under which they were produced must be understood, and the fact that they generally do not represent more than a single segment of reality must be remembered.
Accessibility of information on the Internet does not guarantee its visibility. The transparency and access to documents are frequently invoked as a sure sign of an institution’s democracy, but if you want to know what is going on, what documents should you request? (Weiler 1999, 349). Transparency is only real if those who govern, in addition to making facts available, provide information. This brings us back to the problem of mediation, which was what we thought we could overcome. It is tricky to look at the Internet with the categories of traditional public space thinking that everything here is public and everything is information (Cardon 2010). For something to be public, it is not sufficient that it be accessible; for information to exist, there must be a specific elaboration of facts. This indeterminacy expresses the greatness of the Web, but also its limitations.
In addition to limits, transparency can have perverse effects. Many people have noted that the Internet can become an instrument for opacity: the increase of facts provided to citizens complicates their job of vigilance (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007). Any piece of information we are incapable of understanding would make us like Aeschylus’s characters who “had vision but saw nothing” (1985, 73). It is opacity and not the lack of transparency that most impoverishes democracies. Obsessing about transparency and neglecting everything else are the same as erring on where to focus attention. Our biggest enemy is not secrets, concealment, or intrigues, but banality.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning something surprising that makes political reality unintelligible, not because we lack facts or because we do not scrutinize our representatives carefully enough, but because we do so excessively, constantly, and instantaneously. Extreme vigilance of political actors can make them overprotect their actions. One example of this is the fact that many politicians, knowing that their smallest acts and declarations are examined and shared, tend to put their communications in a straitjacket. Democracy today is more impoverished by speeches that say nothing than by the express concealment of information.
Democratic societies are right to demand greater and simpler access to information. But the abundance of facts does not guarantee democratic vigilance; for that, we also need to mobilize communities of interpreters capable of giving a context, meaning, and critical assessment. Separating the essential from the anecdotal, analyzing, and situating facts within an adequate framework require intermediaries who have time and cognitive competencies. Political parties are an essential instrument to reducing that complexity. In this task of interpreting reality, journalists are also inevitable. Their job is not going to be superfluous in the age of the Internet. Quite the opposite. Journalists are bound to play an important role in this cognitive mediation to interest people, animate public debate, and decipher the complexity of the world (Rosanvallon 2008, 342). But I am defending the cognitive necessity of the political system and the means of communication and not its representatives who, like everyone, can also clearly be improved.
We should not underestimate interpretative challenges in a world of fluctuations where there is excessive information while our understanding is overwhelmed, saturated, and disoriented. Commenting on and interpreting reality are not something that just anyone can do well, as promised by the dream that bloggers themselves will begin producing information. Validating, interpreting, and communicating information demand competence and responsible actions.
Defending this task of mediation today is like renouncing the easy pleasure of floating downstream: almost no one wants to renounce the possibility of expressing indignation that is found in the possibility of killing the intermediary. In the face of all the promises of interpretative patience, the Internet is a space that offers direct participation and democracy, expression and decision without intermediaries. All of which is linked with the democratic distrust toward the expert and the resulting celebration of the common citizen who seems democratically unobjectionable. The freedom of the amateur in contrast to the restrictions of the professional: this is the new conflict for which the Internet constitutes a formidable battleground (Leadbeater and Miller 2000; Keen 2008; Flichy 2010). Some people even celebrate the appearance of new amateur journalists who might come to replace the professionals. The presence of the amateur, of the scandalized leaker, is very important and doubtlessly helps democratize the process of the creation and circulation of information. But in reality, there is a much more complex network of cooperation between them: only the great papers have the ability necessary to make use of those mountains of information. A specific sign that transparency was not the only thing that was in play is the fact that the leak was negotiated, with exclusivity granted to a limited group of papers.
In the end, we end up needing mediation, professionalism, and representation. Without them, the world is less intelligible and more ungovernable. We will need to judge whether these conditions do what they need to do well and not allow ourselves to be trapped by the lazy illusion that their mere lack will make us free.
SECRETS ARE ELSEWHERE
The fact that we live in a complex society is another way to refer to the fact that things have become very confusing for us. Our unlimited possibilities for observation and information are not proportionate to our limited ability to gain a coherent idea of the world, knowing where the most important things are and unmasking unjustified concealment. This opacity is due to the fact that the distribution of power is more volatile, the determination of causes and responsibilities is more complex, presences are virtual, and enemies are diffuse. Society understands itself less and less from the visible actions of individuals or concrete groups; it is established as an intrigue beginning with interactions that are complex and difficult to recognize.
In a democracy, this opacity is not welcomed as good news but as something that, in principle, should be fought. The birth of modern democracy includes suspicion toward power and especially toward hidden power. We tend to think that the state is always tempted to abuse its prerogatives, that it protects by invoking excessive confidentiality, and that it only affords information that does not put itself at risk. Our political institutions and practices have been formed through this tension; they have been confronted with demands for transparency and publicity. We should not be surprised by citizens’ suspicion or by the state’s invocation of secrets, because both are part of the political debate in a democratic society.
It is striking that we look at reality with just one eye, in a manner of speaking. We scrutinize the political system so closely, but our scrutiny of the economic world is superficial, even though we make transcendental decisions there, presuming optimal conditions of information and transparency. Opacity in politics and transparency in the economy? If the economic crisis has revealed anything, it is that this contrast is not true, that it is even the result of a deliberate ideological maneuver, because our permanent observation of politics contrasts with the elevated clandestineness that economic agents have enjoyed. In fact, even though there is always room for improvement, the opacity of the states is not as solid as sometimes bemoaned, and the transparency of the markets is not as effective as some people proclaim.
In the first place, any state should submit to a series of rules to communicate its decisions, whether it is in the present moment (because of the obligation of publicity and in order to create statistical instruments to explain its actions) or in a delayed fashion (by creating archives and making them available). Internal controls and evaluations, guarantees of democracy, strict regulation of official secrets and reserved materials, vigilance of the means of communication, the evaluation of public policy, all of this feeding a never-ending wave of scrutiny, criticism, and counterarguments. Rankings, reports, and statistics provide information about states that are barely in control of their own image anymore. If that were not enough, states are observed by others (in an especially intense way in the case of the European Union, where, because of the interdependencies and mutualization of sovereignty, they are forced to at least be aware of the impact of their decisions on other states). The state is also probed by economic actors, who assess fiscal policies or weigh their level of risk. The state can barely escape from the demand to make its actions and ways of operating public. As Castells (2003) notes, the state today is more observed than observer. Long gone are the times when political actors had the privilege of looking without being seen; they are now subjected to continuous and unlimited observation.
We shall see what is taking place in areas we tend not to observe. In contrast, economic opacity has not stopped growing in recent years. It is true that market functionality requires transparency in principle. Economic actors can only adopt correct decisions if their predictions are well founded, in other words, if they dispose of all the information necessary to limit the amount of change involved in their decisions. However, since the 1980s, economic theory has tried to explain situations of distortion or asymmetry of information that falsify relations between actors and the possibility of a general equilibrium of the market. This inequality is even more contingent in the financial markets or when the contagion effects of opinions or self-fulfilling prophecies turn information into a weapon in the economic war. We have seen this with the financial crisis: the sophistication of financial products has created an uncontrolled complexity that feeds risks capable of destabilizing economic life as a whole.
I am not only referring to the fact that deregulation has allowed the resourceful use of uncontrolled areas: banking secrets, tax havens, over-the-counter markets, dark pools, and so on. These could all be viewed as exceptional cases. The most serious problem is that there is structural opacity: given that credit derivatives, for example, are based on other financial instruments and often combine various additional risks, the potential for loss cannot be fully measured. The dynamics of innovation in global finances entail a string of risks that can increase general risk through unknown hidden influences and combined effects. Securitization has acted as a global mechanism for a lack of responsibility, which disseminated and concealed risks, introducing securities into the markets with risks that no one was able to evaluate. The development of new, exotic, illiquid financial instruments, the growth of increasingly complex derivatives, and the fact that many financial institutions are opaque or little regulated have all contributed to the general lack of transparency. This opacity has destroyed the confidence of investors. The difficulty of evaluating prices, risks, or toxicity has turned into general uncertainty. In the end, it turned out that with certain financial products, people did not know exactly what they were buying and the risks they were assuming.
It is not surprising that we are only now, with a delay, noticing the extent to which the economic crisis stemmed from measurements and calculations that presumed exactitude that they were not in any position to provide (Charolles 2008; Beauvallet 2009). There are more and more voices that warn of the inherent limits of any modeling and that question the supposedly absolute trustworthiness of the measuring systems or the preciseness of previsions.
Current mistrust can be interpreted as a reaction of investors against an opaque financial system, whose scope they do not fully understand. “The mathematical complexity of financial innovation and transactions has been running ahead not only of the ability of regulators to follow (much less to control a priori) but also of the ability of many firms ... to understand” (Cerny 1994, 331). The economy is not, of course, a simple reality, but when the inevitable complexity becomes suspicious opacity, actors become blocked and markets stop functioning. We could talk in this case about ideologically produced opacity. The very fact of presenting financial affairs as something excessively technical and complex has facilitated a transfer of authority toward the supposed experts and has devalued the authority of those who govern. This has depoliticized these affairs and removed relevant decisions from public discussion.
It is not fair that the vigilance of the world is so poorly divided. If the economy were subjected to the same degree of observation as politics, that in itself would make things run much better. When will there be a WikiLeaks for the markets? For lack of a better term, this is another name for global economic governance.
UNRAVELING AN ILLUSION
For years now, the Internet has been provoking illusions of democratization that do not fully correspond with the results. We were told to expect accessibility of information, the elimination of secrets, and the dissolving of power structures, in such a way that it seemed inevitable to advance with the democratization of society, renewing our tedious democracy or implanting it in societies that seemed protected in the face of the most beneficial effects of the Internet. The results do not seem to be on a par with what was announced, and the first theories of this disillusionment that are attempting to problematize the myth of digital democracy are now being formulated. This resistance to adjusting promises to fit possibilities is probably very human, so we oscillate between expectations and disappointment, before figuring out what it is reasonable to expect.
The illusion that nurtures all technological innovation is also very human. Social utopia is part of the emergence of technologies, and history is full of exaggerated dreams raised by technical possibilities. Marx believed that the train would destroy the caste system in India; the telegraph was presented as the definitive end of prejudices and hostilities between nations; some people celebrated the airplane as a means of transportation that would suppress not only distances, but also wars; similar dreams accompanied the birth of the radio and television. We now contemplate those assumptions with scorn and irony, but in their moment, they afforded a sense of promise.
The technologies to which we owe the current deployment of social networks have not been isolated from this phenomenon, in this case, additionally, with good reason. It is logical that a technology that empowers, freely connects, and facilitates access to knowledge awakens illusions of democratic emancipation. The anarchist-liberal story of the founders of the Internet has been retold by people of every ideological persuasion, on the Right and on the Left. Digital optimists have always overestimated the democratizing effect of the free circulation of information, which is the reputation it acquired with the fall of the communist regimes. On the other hand, old-fashioned hippies ended up at universities and technological centers trying to prove that the Internet could provide what the 1960s promised: greater democratic participation, individual emancipation, a strengthening of community life, and so on.
Once the exaggerated expectations are overcome, we are in a position to unravel this illusion and ask ourselves if the Internet has truly increased the public sphere and the extent to which it has made new forms of participation possible, increasing the power of the people in the face of the elites. Without ignoring the Internet’s capabilities, we can critically examine the promises of cyber-utopianism, that ingenuous belief in the inexorably emancipatory nature of online communication that is unaware of its limits or even its dark side. It seems to me that these errors can be synthesized around the conceptions of technology, power, and democracy that underlie the dream of digital democracy. We frequently understand technology in a deterministic manner, without taking its social context sufficiently into account; cyberspace is conceived as an area where power disappears; we praise the destabilizing function of the Web in relation to repressive systems without paying enough attention to the constructive dimension of democracy.
For the concrete case of information and communication technologies, it is also valid to say that the enthusiasm for technology has simplified the vision of its political effects, exaggerated its possibilities, and minimized its limitations. Much of our perplexity about the limits or ambiguities of the social processes made technologically possible is due to not having understood that any technological innovation is carried out in a social context and has social effects that vary according to the context in which they are deployed. Technological determinism tends to think of its users as passive subjects of transferred technology and not as people who appropriate it in their own ways.
Information does not flow in a void but in a political space that is already occupied, organized, and structured in terms of power (Keohane and Nye 1998). If we would have kept this in mind, we would not have been naïve enough to think that a technology as sophisticated as the Internet would produce identical results in different countries. We would know that the Internet puts into motion dynamics that increase uncertainty around the path that societies will take, both in consolidated democracies and in authoritarian regimes.
Social networks are, of course, a democratizing factor, but many other things as well. Not having understood that the logic of technology varies from one context to another, we have not adequately assessed the effect of the Internet on authoritarian regimes and its unforeseen consequences. Western observers have assumed that dictators could not use the Internet in their favor because they thought that the Internet’s decentralization of power was a universal phenomenon, a rule without exception, and not a rule specific to our democracies.
The other principle that has been assumed claimed that global networks constitute a movement that is contrary to the concentration of power, that they destabilize the authority of the elites and tend to quash established imbalances (Castells 2011, 136). However, to what extent is the Internet’s structure so open? Is it true that citizens are listened to more closely in cyberspace, that networks decentralize audiences, favor the flexibility of organizations, and allow for the disintermediation of political activity? It may be that the mechanisms of exclusion have changed, but this does not mean they have disappeared. The “gatekeepers” (who leak on information channels and condition our decisions) are still part of our social and political landscape. There are those who even claim that there is greater audience concentration on the Internet than through traditional means of communication (Hindman 2009). There is not necessarily more objectivity or less partisanship in the open space of the Internet than in the space of traditional media. The fact that power is decentralized or more diffuse does not mean that there is less power, that we are freer, or that there is higher-quality democracy.
The Internet does not eliminate power relationships, but it transforms them. The great opening-up of the Internet is what, paradoxically, has contributed to the creation of new elites. It is well known that the most influential blogs in the United States do not represent much social plurality (almost all of them belong to middle- or upper-class white men). There continue to be imbalances on the Web; it is naïve to think that the Internet always and necessarily favors the oppressed over the oppressor. It is true that new technologies allow a type of “monitorial citizenship” (Schudson 1999), a critical vigilance on the part of the public that has democratizing effects, but there are also phenomena of “crowdsourcing” censorship, of regressive vigilance in which Internet actors can participate. In fact, there is increasingly more censorship carried out by intermediaries than by governments, and this censorship takes on commercial rather than strictly political forms.
But the most important reason behind the persistence of power relationships on the Internet is structural; it is found in its very design. To understand the infrastructure of power on the Internet, we must keep in mind that its connective nature determines the content that citizens see, in virtue of which not all choices are equal. The Internet follows a “winner take all” logic that has profound implications in terms of inequality (Lessig 1999). This is not due to norms or laws but to the decisions that are found in the very design of the Internet, which determines what users are or are not allowed to do. The topology link that regulates the traffic on the Web makes the Internet somewhat less open than what was hoped or feared. There is a structural hierarchy because of “hyperlinks,” an economic hierarchy of the big corporations like Google or Microsoft, and a social hierarchy because a certain type of professional is overrepresented on forums for online opinions.
The Internet contains a concentration of search engine providers. They appear as simple mediators or claim to limit themselves to reflecting existing traffic, but they also direct and condition the traffic. The Web allows for the proliferation of pages and places, but in fact, search engines centralize the attention of the public in such a way that interactions are more limited than we tend to believe and the number of places we visit is smaller than we presume. What causes this?
It is due to the fact that the options are strictly predefined, and they sometimes set aside more important alternatives. Although it is in principle possible for individuals to control these options, only a minority of people is capable of doing so. “Google’s great trick is to make everyone feel satisfied with the possibility of choice, without actually exercising it to change the system’s default settings” (Vaidhyanathan 2011, 2157–2163). With this in mind, it is not too much to affirm that current cultural imperialism is a question not of content but of protocols. What is in play here is the question of the neutrality of the Web: the influence that is exercised on users is not in the content but in the framework. It is at this level where our ways of searching and finding, exploring and buying are structured. It is a matter of an influence that conditions our habits with a nudge and that, to that same extent, can be considered an ideological expression. The supreme value of this ideology is “free expression,” and it carries a suspicious similarity to the values of deregulation, freedom of circulation, and transparency, all understood in a neoliberal fashion. It is because of this that these values are hard to assume in other cultures, but also in democratic countries that, like France and Germany, try to impede access, for example, to anti-Semitic pages.
Digital activism is already a few years old, and it affords us some experience. The most important is that we must distinguish the critical and destabilizing function from the ability for democratic construction. The example of the Arab revolts reveals that tearing down is not building, that decentralization is not sufficient for the success of political reforms. The fact that Barack Obama was better as a candidate than he is as president should serve to control the fascination that the Internet has exercised on those who seem to have forgotten that winning elections is not the same as governing, in the same way that communicating well is not equivalent to making opportune decisions.
For the transformation of authoritarian systems, the indispensable presence on the Internet can even be ineffective and illusory. Morozov has criticized this “cloud activism” (2011, 170) that can end up implying scorn for practice, for other forms of social action as important for democratization as the physical occupation of spaces. The relative “comfort” of the digital world can make mobilization take the place of organization (Davis 2005).
The fact that the Internet is ripping down
barriers, weakening the power of institutions and intermediaries, should not make us forget that institutions must function smoothly in order to allow for the preservation of freedom. This is the reason that the Internet can facilitate the destruction of authoritarian regimes but is not as effective when it comes to consolidating democracy. Access to the instruments of democratization is not the same as the democratization of a society.
Those who are in favor of social networks often forget that if an authoritarian government loses control over its people, that does not mean that it will inevitably be replaced by democracy. A failed state can be worse than an authoritarian one. The power of the Internet linked with the incompetence of a weak state is the precursor of anarchy and injustice.
We could conclude with the evidence that the emergence of the Internet is going to profoundly modify politics, which can no longer be practiced as it has been. At the same time, we should not slip into the type of digital sanctimoniousness that seems unaware of its contradictions. The fact that the Internet is based on simplicity and confidence also constitutes its vulnerability; it facilitates resistance, criticism, and mobilization, but it exposes us to new risks in new ways.
Certain phenomena like the financialization of the economy or the spread of errors are also part of the face of the Internet that some call dark, but that I would prefer to call risky. However, when have human beings had an instrument whose emancipatory capabilities did not also include possibilities of self-destruction? Governing specifically means fomenting emancipatory capabilities while preventing or impeding self-destructive ones.