The people you meet through teaching, both colleagues and students, are invaluable sources of insight. All have helped to gather stories, talked through the interpretation of data, and offered insightful comments. While working at the University of Washington, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Central European University, I have been researching and testing a cluster of propositions under the pax technica rubric with an extended team of researchers. Academic colleagues, democracy advocates, and state censors have been invaluable in sharing stories, doing interviews, and running big data analysis. Roberto Juárez-Garza wrote an excellent master’s degree thesis on the use of social media in Monterrey, Mexico. Mary Joyce built an impressive database of digital-activism cases. Muzammil Hussain traveled North Africa and the Middle East for additional interviews during the Arab Spring. Marwa Mazaid proffered stories from her fieldwork in Cairo and Istanbul. Aiden Duffy and Deen Freelon crunched the “big data.” Conversations with Eman Abdelrahman, Gregory Asmolov, Primož Kovačič, Patrick Meier, and Oscar Morales were inspiring. I am also grateful to democracy advocates in Azerbaijan, China, Russia, Singapore, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela who were willing to meet and talk. Matthew Adeiza, Will Mari, Elisa Mason, Ruchika Tulshyan, and Sam Woolley gave great editing and research advice.
Portions of this manuscript have appeared in Philip N. Howard and Muzammil Hussain, State Power 2.0: Digital Networks and Authoritarian Rule (London: Ashgate, 2013), Philip N. Howard and Muzammil Hussain, “What Best Explains Successful Protest Cascades? ICTs and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring,” International Studies Review 15, no. 1 (2013): 48–66, and some public writing.
I am very grateful for input from my agent, Will Lippincott, and my editor, Joe Calamia. At Yale University Press, Dan Heaton edited the manuscript and taught me what grammatical expletives were (and that I had too many). Samantha Ostrowski prepared the book for release, and Nancy Ovedovitz designed the book’s jacket. Their support and friendly critiques have made this a stronger manuscript. Princeton University, the University of Washington, and Central European University in Budapest provided support for my time to write, access to first-class research materials, and interaction with diverse intellectual and policy communities.
I have benefited from many different kinds of public research support for this work. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1144286, “RAPID—Social Computing and Political Transition in Tunisia,” grant number 0713074, “Human Centered Computing: Information Access, Field Innovation, and Mobile Phone Technologies in Developing Countries,” and grant number BIGDATA-1450193, “EAGER CNS—Computational Propaganda and the Production/Detection of Bots.” It is based upon work supported by the U.S. Institutes of Peace under grant number 212–11F, “Digital Media, Civic Engagement, and Non-Violent Conflict.” Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or U.S. Institute of Peace.
For their feedback on earlier drafts and presentations of this work, I thank Lance Bennett, Larry Diamond, Steve Schultze, and Annemarie Slaughter. For conversations on radios, sensors, applications, and chip design I thank Josephine Bolotski, Andrew Donovan, Steven Dossick, and Dan Kasha. For their support in creating good environments for writing and research, I thank David Domke, Ed Felten, Judy Howard, Ellen Hume, and John Shattuck.
Hammer and Gordon Howard are still the key reasons for working hard (please help I am being held %#$@! . . . . .).
Budapest, Hungary