General elections can be the crowning moments of the call by despots to rule indefinitely by popular demand. Yet precisely because things sometimes go wrong at the polls, rulers do not depend exclusively on elections. Sly despots know the dangers of relying on fickle voters. They are well aware that history is much bigger than rigged elections and phantom by-elections. That is why they harness supplementary methods of winning popular support. In between the stage dramas of periodic elections, rulers use nonstop media manipulation to win approval from those whom they rule.
To understand how they manage to do this, in distinctive style, we need first to go back, to take stock of things, in order to prepare for some surprises. We have seen that the new despotisms defy the standard textbook categories and classifications of political science. A new species of top-down rule marked by recombinant qualities, these despotisms are systems of state-regulated capitalism in which wide gaps between rich and poor are bridged by top-to-bottom patron-client connections, middle-class loyalty, staged elections, and a great deal of officially sanctioned talk of the people as the veritable source of political order. Yet there is another secret, something else of fundamental importance, vital for understanding how the new despotisms operate: these are systems of rule that manage to weaponize the unfinished digital communications revolution of our time.
Everybody knows that this incomplete media revolution has ended spectrum scarcity, mass broadcasting, and predictable prime-time national audiences. Our age of communicative abundance is structured by a new global system of overlapping and interlinked digital media structures and devices such as mobile phones and artificially intelligent robots.1 For the first time in history, thanks to smart algorithms and built-in cheap microprocessors, this system integrates texts, sounds, and images in digitally compact and easily storable, reproducible, and portable form. Communicative abundance enables messages to be sent and received through multiple user points, at chosen times (either in real time or delayed), within modularized and ultimately global networks that are affordable and accessible to several billion people scattered everywhere. Viewed historically, the transformative potential of this new mode of digital communication is astonishing. Yet the whole world is slowly learning that its disruptive force and positive effects should not blindly be exaggerated. Communicative abundance does not bring paradise to earth. In the same way that in the 1920s the advent of mass broadcasting (radio and cinema, then television) gave a helping hand to the birth of totalitarian power, so the age of digital platforms and networks and communicative abundance makes possible the spread of despotic rule.
The new despotisms confirm the formula that, historically speaking, different modes of power always take advantage of new modes of communication. How do they do this? Most obviously, the rulers of the new despotisms don’t hide themselves away behind walls of secrecy, as old-fashioned dictators liked to do, and as early modern commentators typically supposed when denouncing despotism as a system of government shrouded in “the silence which reigns in the seraglio.”2 The new despotisms are just the opposite. They are visual, noisy, and garrulous affairs. They make full use of communicative abundance. Despots like publicity, and liking money as well, they surround themselves with media conglomerates. More than a few despotisms display Disney-like qualities, melding their governments with corporate media, journalism, advertising, and entertainment. The state-capitalist dalliance serves multiple functions. Large media firms depend upon the protective regulatory frameworks established by despotic governments. The media conglomerates like tax breaks, safe havens, business parks, and handouts in the form of government contracts. The effectiveness of governments and their methods of tightening surveillance require secure access to communication infrastructures. Big media conglomerates are serial tax dodgers, but they do generate employment and play a large role as drivers and gatekeepers of the middle-class consumer economy. Not to be underestimated is their role as fairy godmothers blessed with the power of sprinkling incumbent governments with the magic dust of positive media coverage—or of dishing out crusades and bullying, shit lists, character assassinations, black public relations, and other types of rough media treatment.
Remarkably, more than a few despots, with the help of media giants, try to turn their political regimes into works of art. The new despotisms have a fancy for status-driven architectural wonders and construction megaprojects. Prize-winning architects and lucre-loving developers launch projects featuring land reclamation, posh apartment towers, floating seahorse-shaped villas with underwater bedrooms, artificial beaches, beach club spas, infinity pools, even climate-controlled public squares in the desert cooled by artificial snow. The landmarks include Dubai’s tree-shaped Palm Jumeirah island; China’s Nanhui, a German-designed new city built on land reclaimed from the sea, marked by a beach, forested park, and huge artificial lake inspired by the design metaphor of concentric ripples formed in water by a single drop; and Qatar’s Lusail complex, a smart city built for the 2022 World Cup, featuring the Qetaifan Islands, a place advertised as offering “a fresh perspective on life.” The islands are a man-made paradise, where the dwellings are “a true indication of style and status, where luxurious waterfront living meets exclusive property and a warm community feel.”
The new despotisms have soft spots for the pomp and circumstance of grand sporting events and other entertainment spectacles that radiate the impression that life is good and progress is happening on all fronts. We are going to see that the new despotisms are jumpy about bad news, nervous about the past, and censorial, but that is why, through media spectacles, they strive to add new content and style to the old art of bread and circuses.
Consider the cosmopolitan metropolis of Abu Dhabi.3 Capital city of the United Arab Emirates, the largest of its seven semi-autonomous city-states, and currently ranked among the richest cities in the world, Abu Dhabi is ruled by royals who have pulled out all stops to move it beyond its reputation as one of the world’s largest oil producers and toward being a new skyscraper Hollywood of the age of communicative abundance. Home to Etihad Airways, state-controlled mosques, and nearly a million people, including a wealthy middle class and a large majority of nonunionized and often badly treated migrant workers, Abu Dhabi has become a haven for global media conglomerates. It is home to the world’s first graduate-level, research-based artificial intelligence university (MBZUAI). The city aspires to be the kingpin in a media production and supply chain that “unites the world.” Huge oil and gas revenues and sovereign wealth funds (among the world’s largest) have been pumped into Abu Dhabi Media, the state-owned group that owns and directs much of the domestic media, including the world’s first fiber-to-the-home network, mobile phone services, newspapers, and television and radio stations, including one that is devoted to readings from the Quran. Abu Dhabi Media has working partnerships with Fox International Channels, a unit of News International, and enjoys Arabic-language programming deals with such giants as National Geographic and Comedy Central. Abu Dhabi Media also hosts Image Nation, a body that underwrites the production of feature films. A free-zone office park project called twofour54 (named after the city’s geographical coordinates) houses foreign news agencies, including CNN, which produces a daily news show for its global channel. Twofour54 boasts state-of-the-art production facilities as well as a venture capital arm to invest in promising Arabic-language media start-ups, and it hosts a world-class media training academy that offers short skills-based courses targeted at talented young media workers.
For culture consumers, there is the government-controlled Abu Dhabi Exhibition Center; the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix; the Abu Dhabi Classical Music Society, which boasts a strong and visible following; the Louvre Abu Dhabi; and the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, which works to preserve and publicize “the art and culture of the city.” Of vital strategic importance to the ruling authorities is the government marketing and entertainment body called Flash Entertainment, whose motto is “Put simply, we make people happy.” It has presented big-name musical acts like Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, and Aerosmith, and sporting events such as the AFC Asian Cup 2019 (with its slogan “Bringing Asia Together”). Vexed questions about whether, or to what extent, the citizens and noncitizens of the UAE are happy, what happiness means, or whether they or their journalist representatives might freely be able to remedy their unhappiness remain unanswered. More than a few Western expatriates living there simply don’t care about answers.4
Abu Dhabi fancies itself as the new Hollywood without the old California. Governed by leading members of the ruling family, open public monitoring of power is haram (forbidden). Its citizens are rentiers and vassals, beneficiaries of state-guaranteed jobs, transfer payments, and other forms of untaxed income and wealth. Free and fair elections are regarded as a thing from yesteryear. Democracy makes no political sense, say members of the royal family privately, as it causes unwanted social divisions. Hence the priority they give to blocking hundreds of websites considered publicly offensive and to routinely cleansing local media infrastructures of pornography and blasphemous commentaries on the God-given noble blood of the rulers.
Operating within media-saturated environments serviced by large media conglomerates, rulers do all they can to be seen and heard constantly on multiple media platforms. Communicative abundance feeds despotism in ways unimaginable to thinkers of the past. The ancient Athenian tyrant Pisistratus (608–527 BCE) won political fame using dirty tricks, such as slashing himself and the mules hauling his chariot with a sword just prior to staging a bloody entrance into the agora (public marketplace) to show why he deserved the support of the assembly of male citizens; they voted him use of a public bodyguard of club-wielding citizens, who then helped him seize the Acropolis and control over Athens in 560 / 559 BCE. Machiavelli recommended that rulers should strive to become skilled practitioners of simulatore e dissimulatore, the art of appearing to others what in fact they are not. He cited the case of the early fourteenth-century Roman senator Castruccio Castracani, who assumed office dressed in a brocaded toga bearing on its front the words “God wills it” and on its back “What God wills shall be.”5 Writing in the age of the quill, ink, and parchment, when rulers divined their subjects into believing that monarchs were the earthly head of their realms just as Jesus Christ was their Savior, Machiavelli could not have anticipated how life under conditions of despotism is a permanent public relations bombardment campaign. Cunning old Pisistratus and Machiavelli would be astonished at the new rulers’ taste for omnivorous self-publicity. The new despotisms are theater states: everybody and everything is entangled in printed texts, sounds, and images designed to function as props of ruling power, without respite.
Why the intensive publicity? The most obvious reason is that under conditions of despotism the powerful know they must never be spotted naked. Power denuded is power taunted. Despots learn from hard experience that no polity can survive over time unless it has public support. Here there is a more general point, with a particular twist. Following Talleyrand, historians and political thinkers refer to the political problem of legitimacy faced by all rulers.6 They remind us that insofar as power exercised over others easily induces fears of corruption, disorder, and violence, fears that engulf rulers and the ruled alike, stable and secure government requires the tempering of fear by cultivating shared feelings (“spirit,” Montesquieu called it) among the governed that existing power arrangements are backed by principles of good government, and are therefore right and proper, and should be honored and respected. According to this way of thinking, principles of legitimacy are justifications of power. They are magical formulae that have alchemical effects. Arbitrarily chosen rules come to seem wholly reasonable. Contingent principles pass for timeless truths that are self-evident and unalterable. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy: these and other sets of incommensurable principles of legitimacy, the historians and political thinkers tell us, imply a contract between rulers and ruled, who are duty-bound to obey rules reinforced by the prevailing set of governing institutions.
Note the presumption in this way of thinking about legitimacy that each set of arbitrarily defined rules directly corresponds to a particular set of governing institutions. Things are not like that in the new despotisms. Their poetics of power are different. Remarkable is the way they manage to break with the one-regime, one-mode-of-legitimacy principle. Despotisms take a leaf out of the book of Charles V, the legendary sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor who chose to learn so many languages in order to rule over his vast empire that he was said (according to contemporary anecdotes) to speak Spanish to God, Italian to friends, German to enemies, and French to lovers. The new despotisms similarly practice the art of ruling through multiple sources of legitimacy; their ships of state are powered by winds blowing from many directions. Twentieth-century totalitarian regimes ruled through a combination of all-purpose terror and a dominant “glorious myth” ideology that claimed “to know the mysteries of the whole historical process” and its supposed “natural” laws, such as the coming triumph of the classless society and the inevitability of a war between “chosen” and “degenerate” races. The new despotisms ditch ideologies.7 Their rulers come draped in colorful magic coats made of different languages and styles. The colors are those of a scrambled sunset. To switch images, the new despotisms resemble an impressive political show, a souped-up version of early twentieth-century vaudeville, performances that featured strongmen and singers, dancers and drummers, minstrels and magicians, acrobats and athletes, comedians and circus animals.
The big despotism tent show is a new type of vaudeville government, let’s call it. The rulers parade their magicians, drummers, and dancers. They preach the national interest, national solidarity, and the recapturing of “national dignity” and “national pride.” “Sovereignty” is a favorite word in their arsenal. So are weaponized phrases such as “law and order,” “peace,” “anti-imperialism,” and protection from “foreign enemies.” Acting like open-door cages in search of unsuspecting birds, despotisms encourage their subjects to say things like “We don’t have any problem with this government and our leader. We respect him. He’s strong. The government has brought stability. It has done a lot for our country.” The worship of country means that past national catastrophes and failures must be forgotten; as in Chinese author Ma Jian’s fantastical story of the search for “China Dream Soup,” government-enforced denial and forgetfulness are compulsory.8 There is instead pragmatic, businesslike patter about “stability” and “growth.” Forced redevelopment, earning money, growing rich, and general prosperity are articles of faith. Loyal subjects say: “Our lives have improved. Millions have been lifted out of poverty. Even if hard times come, we’ll support the government.”
There is much talk of revealing “truth,” and it often comes mixed with divine inspirations, allusions to climbing Jacob’s ladder to heaven, and stern calls to “obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you” (Quran 4:59). In an age marked by the death of God, the powerful can be viewed with greater suspicion, hence their efforts to cling to religious scriptures, proverbs, and sayings. In Saudi Arabia, where seventy thousand mosques and the mutawa, or religious police, back the rulers’ stated adherence to the ascetic principles of Wahhabism, more than a few subjects count themselves lucky that they are not getting the government they are promised. There is widespread awareness that since official religion has become a clunky ritual, there is room for parallel worlds in which Christianity, Sufism, and Shiite Islam are de facto tolerated; where middle-class Saudis shop, drink whiskey, and sleep with sex workers when on vacation in Bahrain and Lebanon; and where there are even spaces for young people (around 60 percent of the population is twenty years of age or younger) to do a spot of online “fatwa shopping.”
In Erdoğan’s Turkey, officials encourage musicians, radio and television programmers, teachers, and chefs to join the campaign to cast aside old feelings of inferiority and to make the Ottoman fatherland (vatan) great again by renewing Islam as a central pillar of public life. Oman’s Ministry of Tourism sells its country as a place of authentic “heritage” (turath) expressed through “traditions” (taqalid) like those displayed at fine hotels, where staff in ceremonial dress warmly greet tourists with invitations to lounge on locally made carpets and sip coffee flavored with cardamom, rosewater, and dates, the air perfumed with the sweet, woody scent of burning frankincense. In Iran, a country often misdescribed as a theocracy, vaudeville is everywhere. Candidates in fiercely fought elections take religion for granted, as a common language, yet secular, this-wordly language is also spoken in abundance. Elections are of course strictly vetted by the Guardians Council, and references abound to sacred Shiite principles and practices: pilgrimages to shrines, intercession, mourning for Hussein (the grandson of Muhammad), and the reappearance of the Mahdi (the “hidden” imam). But there is simultaneously much profane talk of peace, welfare, economic growth, national stability, serving the people (mardum), advancing the status of women, the dangers of corruption, and the need to honor election outcomes.9
Under conditions of despotism, there are public displays of benevolence, national holidays, and ritual celebrations. The rainbow performances are designed as light entertainment that has the serious effect of putting blinkers on the eyes of public doubt. Turkmenistan’s elected leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, races fast cars, rides horses, publishes books, performs hospital operations and rap videos, writes serenades for women, strums his guitar at workers’ rallies, and hands out televisions and other gifts to local citizens.10 In China, leaders at all levels spout the mantras of “socialism,” “harmonious society,” “rule of law,” “ancient Chinese civilization,” and the “China dream.” There’s also lots of mellifluous chatter about “people’s democracy.” Elsewhere there are vocal expressions of nostalgia for pasts treated as paradise lost combined with calls for fresh beginnings and breakthroughs defined by greater respect from the wider world, territorial expansion, greater power, and more glory. And there are plenty of references to enemies, as in Orbán’s Hungary, where the government-controlled media machine denounces “liberalism” and “liberal democracy” as the accomplice of a wide range of ills, from foreign disparagement of the Magyars as a great “global nation” to fractious party-political rivalries, dependence on the West, greedy multinational corporations, the criminality of Gypsies and the unemployed, and the public order threats posed by big banks, demonic Jewish financiers, homosexuals, and pedophiles.
The rulers mobilize communicative abundance to mix and stir different political languages at all levels of the polity. Despots know well that their power is suckled by the milk of symbols. Pomp and performance are not mere means to life but life itself, living proof that power is the servant of pomp, not the other way around. Despots understand that power is the ability to do through others symbolically what they are themselves unable to do alone. They know that language, broadly understood, is the medium of their power. That is why, like Dr. Francia, the figure at the center of the classic Paraguyuan novel I, the Supreme by Roa Bastos, despots grow nervous when confronted by public satire and lampoons. They dislike contrarian pasquinades because they understand that poetic language can assume a public life of its own, and that their loss of control over this medium will prove to be the decisive source of their downfall and defeat.
It is possible to imagine that despots dream in their beds of new ways of purifying the official language of politics; in their wildest dreams, some of them may secretly contemplate banning language altogether.11 They don’t in reality act upon such hallucinations. In the age of communicative abundance, making that move would require self-liquidation, and the liquidation of their subjects. Gone are the days of the crazed fantasy of the purification of language through its abolition, or (its flip side) concocting one big Glorious Myth propagated through endless repetition of organized drumbeat euphemisms, neologisms, and prefixes.12
Seen through the eyes of the rulers, the switch to vaudeville government wrapped in multiple languages has tactical advantages. For a start, despots don’t necessarily suffer the fate of Hamlet, engulfed by the personal tragedy of having a duty to act but crippled by his inability to make up his mind and by his unwillingness to act on his convictions. Actually, vaudeville government is for the new despots liberating. They come steeped in the spirit of Shakespeare’s Duke of Gloucester, confident in their ability to exercise power by adding colors to a chameleon and changing shapes with Proteus. Vaudeville government, by ditching ideological self-righteousness, enables despots to be different things to different people at different times.
Fans of despotism in Singapore typically praise its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, as a tough-minded realist, an archetypal “benevolent dictator” who learned from the British and Japanese colonizers “how to govern, how you dominate the people,” and who disliked yes-men because his favorite question was not “Is it right?” but “So what?” His eldest child and third prime minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, tellingly told Fortune magazine that while a “leadership pyramid” is needed to “hold the system together,” governing is best conducted through “diversity and different views” rather than from “a single point.”
Despots fancy themselves as purveyors of “reality without ideology,” as Orbán put it.13 The truth is that their vaudeville performances blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The political language of their performances is neither straightforwardly Orwellian nor describable in terms of what Michael Walzer famously called “failed totalitarianism,” tyrannies “dressed up in fascist or communist clothing and acting out haphazardly some aspects of fascist or communist ideology.”14 Vaudeville government is more complicated, more willfully confusing than these thinkers could have imagined. Yes, there is the controlled government language of restricted grammar and vocabulary typical of newspeak. Yes, the dominant broadcast media are free—but only to say what they are told to say. And there is plenty of the euphemism, intentional ambiguity, semantic inversion, and sheer cloudy vagueness that are characteristic of doublespeak. But vaudeville government is far more slippery. It is pinned down with difficulty. It feels indescribable. Its kaleidoscopic language is not easily falsified. That is why it lends the regime a people-friendly quality.
The reality of despotism isn’t negotiable, of course, yet opponents of the way things are do not need to be crushed outright. They can be mentioned, acknowledged, and even praised for a time. Surprise moves can be made, as when the Hungarian government led by Viktor Orbán, himself an atheist in his youth and then later an adherent of the Reformed Church, takes part in a Catholic procession and pardons the Muslim murderer of an Armenian Christian in the hope of securing a deal with the nearby despotism of Azerbaijan. The hypocrisy is normal, for the political aim of the rulers is to sail with the political winds, to outflank opponents and to get inside their heads, to exploit them, and, in the end, to make them look like marginal figures or outright fools.
The rulers are equally gripped by a powerful sense that in a world crowded by public stories jostling for attention, whoever tells better stories more aggressively and unscrupulously, whatever their degree of veracity, has a good chance of coming out on top. But closer inspection reveals that their storytelling is motivated by much more than playing factions off against one another in order to defeat them. Rulers know that cant corrupts. Their embrace of contradiction and speaking in tongues has a purpose: to gaslight their subjects into bemused submission.
The term “gaslighting” is indispensable when making sense of vaudeville government. It was coined in the 1950s, a reference to the 1944 film Gaslight, directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, in which a husband tries to convince his wife she is insane. But what does it mean in this new context? For the new despotisms, vaudeville performance is designed to push opponents into submission. It is a political weapon. Vaudeville is not just about winning votes, siding with friends, simulating openness, or managing political foes. Gaslighting is more insidious than the old Machiavellian “art of contrivance,” in which government scripts and stages pseudo-stories and pseudo-events that function as illusions, counterfeit versions of things as they actually are.15 Gaslighting cuts much more deeply into daily life: it is the organized effort to mess with subjects’ identities, to deploy entertainment, conflicting stories, lies, bullshit, and silence for the purpose of sowing the seeds of doubt and confusion among subjects in order to control them fully and durably. The point is to drown subjects in shit, to flood their lives with gaseous excrement.
Elected leaders under democratic conditions are supposed to behave differently. Take the example of American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was well known for his governing strategy of sowing seeds of uncertainty among colleagues and friends. Until recently, Washington staffers and journalists would similarly speak in pragmatic ways of keeping “options open” and making sure that everybody is kept guessing until the moment a decision is made. The public gaslighting that takes place under conditions of despotism is qualitatively different, more comprehensive and intrusive in people’s lives, more sinister in its effects. It is not just a tool of pragmatic public policymaking. It aims to confuse, disorient, and destabilize people. It wants to fuel self-doubt and ruin people’s capacity for making judgments in order to drive them toward submission. Gaslighting through vaudeville government sets out to disprove those who think that “reality” will always trump falsehoods.16 When gaslighting works, its victims report that they don’t really know what’s happening, or that they don’t care. Without firing a shot, citizens are turned into complacent subjects. They buy the tactics of the manipulator. The subjects of despotism fall by default under the spell of their master wizards.
The wizards who produce and direct the vaudeville stage show typically operate backstage, with the help of media conglomerates and well-organized media machines. Their job is to disprove linguists who say that language evades command management because it always functions as a protean, dynamic, self-regulating system of symbols that never sits still. Orbán’s regime entrusts the job of symbol management to a ruling party stalwart named Antal Rogán, baron of the National Communication Office, which pumps out nonstop government messages and conducts campaigns against its opponents through radio and television advertisements, newspaper editorials, bus stop posters, chain emails, tweets, and Facebook posts. Bespectacled, youthful Võ Văn Thưởng, boss of the Central Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of Vietnam, similarly runs a tight operation that dispenses messages about the need for all organizations and the population to study and follow the “guiding principles” of Ho Chi Minh and to work for greater “innovation and efficiency and winning human hearts”; it spreads bon mots such as “laughter is the manifestation of political decadence.” Erdoğan’s image was curated by a master magician of signs, Erol Olçak, an advertiser who (before his death in the failed 2016 coup d’état) won public fame for a shrewd propaganda video, The People Won’t Bend Down, Turkey Won’t Be Divided. Among the chief gaslighters in China is the Shandong-born kung fu fan Wang Huning, a former university professor and now a member of the Politburo and frequenter of Zhongnanhai, China’s equivalent of the White House, who for some time has peddled advice to the Party leadership about the need for a “China dream” in the form of a strong and resilient and uncorrupted state that promotes economic growth and deals with the dangers of environmental pollution.17
Surely the title of Master of the Dark Arts of Gaslighting goes to Vladislav Surkov, a drama graduate of the Moscow Institute of Culture and Vladimir Putin’s former chief court magician, a “gray cardinal” political strategist and champion of “sovereign democracy” (suverennaya demokratiya).18 During Putin’s first two terms in office, the novelist, playwright, political technician, and public relations fixer worked hard to turn the Russian state into a work of art better suited to “new realities.” The media spectacles resembled a Theatre of the Absurd performance. Surkov helped create new political parties and pro-Kremlin youth organizations (like Nashi) skilled at destroying opposition to Putin and working toward a new type of democratic rule that he considered uniquely suited to “Russian political culture.” The word “democracy” left the lips of Surkov riddled with ambivalence: unaccompanied by the adjective “sovereign,” it is a synonym for “distrust and criticism,” political weakness, low quality, and “leveling” (Russians speak of the “democratic prices” of chicken sandwiches and french fries from McDonald’s). That is why Surkov liked to quote the Ukrainian-Russian author and playwright Nikolai Gogol: “If there isn’t one head managing everything it becomes a complex muddle. It’s difficult even to say why; evidently, it’s something about the people. The only meetings that work out are the ones held for revelling or a bit of lunch.” He adds that Russian-style democracy is “rule, strength and order, not weakness, confusion and disorder.” The contrast with Western democracy, which is based on the “illusion of choice”—the “main trick of the Western way of life in general and of Western democracy in particular”—is stark. The great strength of “the modern Russian model of statehood” is that it “begins with trust and rests on trust. This is its fundamental difference with the Western model, which cultivates mistrust and criticism.”
In practice, Surkov’s thinking implies full support for Putin, the ruler who issues constant reminders that “the national agenda calls for active work to modernize the country, not a public holiday to sit around talking about how great it is.” According to Surkov, the “Russian political algorithm” proves that sovereign democracy requires “an effective, leading class.” It strives to be “sophisticated, but not malicious” (the words once used by Einstein when describing God). Hands-on grooming and manipulation of the local mainstream media are especially significant in securing its effectiveness. Pretense is power. Winning the “informational battle … for minds” is imperative for defending the “spirit” of Russia: “a desire for political cohesion through the centralization of authority, the idealisation of goals and the personification of politics.”19
The quintessence of the “personification of politics,” the crowning media moment of the struggle to gaslight subjects, is the annual press conference featuring Putin. Meticulously choreographed, watched by millions, the show lasts several hours. Putin is at center stage, relaxed, serious, sometimes grinning, without a teleprompter, indefatigable, and the master of ceremonies. He knows he is the breaking news, the main story, the country’s fortune-teller. The courtier journalists come equipped with brightly colored banners and toys, some dressed in smart suits or short skirts in order to catch the president’s eye. They fawn; they feel graced by his presence. Nothing fazes him. He is beyond good and evil, pride and humility. General questions are commonplace. “Dear Mr. President,” runs a common type of non-question, “are things going as well as you expected in the difficult war against terrorism?” Or, “How is the strength of our economy?” The man spouts homilies: “There have always been issues. There will always be issues, but we will surely win. My guide is the interests of Russia. Our country is big and complex. We value relations with China and hope that they will develop.” Smiles greet the unobjectionably local questions: “Could you please tell us your favorite color, Mr. President?” “How do you find time to do gym workouts so regularly?” “Are you traveling abroad soon?” At one point, an unbroken three hours of questions and answers behind him, His Eminence jokes: “Love will turn into hatred if we continue this for too long.” He carries on. He tells Russians that it’s high time they get up off their knees. There are softer moments when he plays the role of paterfamilias (or perhaps godfather) of the whole nation: “It’s best not to slap children,” he recommends. He is then asked whether the state will address the declining popularity of reading among children—for instance, through its support for libraries. “Undoubtedly,” he answers, “they need to be revived. They are important for children.” Cute questions are awarded equally cute answers: when asked what kind of robot the Kremlin needs, Putin answers that robots “are important, but so are people. Robots are needed in manufacturing, but we deal with sensitive issues that have an impact on human lives, so we have to be human, and cannot rely on robots.” Nebulous questions get foggy answers mixed with factoids, platitudes, and non sequiturs. The pointed questions are stonewalled. “What’s your biggest mistake as a president?” a journalist dares ask. “Every person makes mistakes,” he replies. “It is important to draw conclusions. Next question.”
The vaudeville performances are as impeccably polished as the Russian media world is topsy-turvy. It is as if the new vaudeville tactics are drawn straight from the old book of rules drawn up by Alexander Shuvalov, the prominent chief of the secret police during the mid-eighteenth-century reign of the Russian empress Elizabeth Petrovna: “Always keep the accused confused.” One moment there are announcements about new funding for civic forums and human rights NGOs. At the next moment support is given to young skinheads, to rehabilitating old fascist ideas (of intellectuals such as Ivan Ilyin, from the 1920s), and to defending nationalist movements that attack NGOs as tools of the West. Victories in war are announced in speeches that describe Russia as an “encircled fortress” threatened by a “decadent West” and “fascists” in denial of a “Russia that is great again.” Strange but striking is the obsession with sexual purity, evident in official rhetoric about the “homosexual” efforts of the United States and the European Union to “sodomize” Russian virtue.20 All this rhetoric comes mixed with talk of modernization, human rights, and sponsorship of lavish arts festivals featuring provocative hipster Moscow artists before support is switched to black-clad Orthodox fundamentalists who proceed to attack modern art as decadent. “The Kremlin’s idea,” observes a prominent journalist, summarizing the logic of Russian-style gaslighting, “is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.”21
The dynamics seem to be replays of the point long ago made by our French tutor Montesquieu, who remarked that under conditions of modern despotism nobody is safe from insecurity. Writing in the age of the printing press, book, pamphlet, and newspaper, he could not have foreseen, let alone imagined, just how in the age of communicative abundance those who live under despotic conditions suffer intense new forms of media discombobulation. In matters of publicity, nothing is fixed, frozen, or forever. Despotisms may seem inwardly calm and stable, but they are pell-mell worlds, regimes of media confusion. Deep uncertainty is a lived reality for many subjects. Those who pay attention often feel dizzy, as if their sense of balance has been disabled by a brain that isn’t able to process and coordinate the constant swirls of information. Nothing is straightforward. Nothing is true. In this looking-glass world, everything is conceivable, imaginable, and sayable, especially if the means of manipulation and silencing can be found to say what is wanted and to prevent others from saying and getting what they want.
Under these conditions of vaudeville government, making sense of things isn’t straightforward. We could say that if real things were embodied straightforwardly in upside-down images, then subjects intent on decoding the world of power would simply have to stand on their heads. Practice would quickly make perfect. The misfortune suffered by subjects of the new despotism is that things are never straightforwardly up or down or across. That is why, as in Saudi Arabia, they have to wear “multiple faces—two, three, four, five, six faces.”22 Most people know they live under a canopy of media spectacles and media blackouts. In some quarters, there is acute awareness that the principle of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) simply doesn’t apply. It follows that since official definitions of reality are typically kaleidoscopic and in perpetual motion, interested citizens are forced to spend quite a lot of time decoding what is being said, or not being said, or revealed. They practice the art of suspecting and seeing through appearances; some of them rate dietrology (decoding official explanations in order to grasp dietro, or what is behind them) among their favorite hobbies.
Talk of conspiracies and cabals flourishes under these conditions. Open secrets—things most people know, spread by gossip and whisperings—are commonplace. Yet people know there are strict limits, electric fences, lines that mustn’t be crossed. They understand that some things are better left unsaid. The electric fences are typically as invisible as they are effective. Not only do they protect the ruling powers, but they encourage the regime’s subjects to believe that they are acting independently.23 Willful self-censorship flourishes. It sits like a raven on people’s shoulders. So also do skepticism and disaffection. Yet not all the subjects of despotism are easily fooled all the time, or rendered docile by gaslighting, which is why despots specialize in information crackdowns and careful gatekeeping to regulate when and where who says what to whom.
The means of censorship are formidable. Despotisms harbor well-kept secrets. Secrecy is indispensable for their successful operation as top-down modes of power. Subjects must be kept in the dark by a system of secrets and regulated information flows reinforced by unusually well-coordinated political dos and don’ts. The media blackouts are backed by a smorgasbord of sanctions familiar to all journalists: a cup of tea with the censors, sharp reprimands by editors, sideways promotions, physical attacks by unidentified thugs, disappearances, and imprisonment (sometimes in “black jails” operated by outsourced mafia gangs employed by the rulers). The pattern is evident in the regime of Ilham Aliyev in Azerbaijan, where investigative journalists, human rights activists, and civil society activists are regularly pressured, beaten, or jailed as “traitors.”24 Within all the new despotisms, tight-fisted controls are most obvious in the field of television. In China, for example, more than a billion people access programs through countrywide, provincial, and metropolitan stations. Foreign satellite channels such as CNN are not widely available and are subject to periodic shutdown. The Publicity Department and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television regularly intervene in matters of program content throughout the country, for instance by ordering channels to limit the length and frequency of entertainment shows, to carry state-approved news items, and, in tricky situations, to disregard audience ratings when deciding on program schedules.
Controls on the content of radio programming are equally strict. Under despotism, there is no real “live” broadcasting; transmission delays are used to filter out possible damaging news items, especially when the rulers are under pressure. Things are more complicated in the field of newspapers, where a combination of regional and linguistic differences and commercial pressures often results in significant variations, even the evasion of controls by editors. A censorship-avoidance game is played hard in the exceptions. The labyrinthine structures of regime control within the world of newspapers are difficult to grasp, even for insiders, in part because market competition provides space for a variety of mastheads, but also because the likes and dislikes of readers are important. In consequence, despite state controls, funding shortages, and the atmosphere of physical intimidation, in-depth investigative journalism sometimes still happens.25
Strict state controls flourish in the field of digital communications media, where thanks to the unfinished digital communications revolution rulers find censorship a trickier affair. Things are changing fast. Consider the most important case of China, a global empire-in-the-making. ChinaNet, the first internet service provider (ISP) in the country, was officially launched only in 1995. Back then, the internet provided a select few users with a limited range of basic services, such as email, web surfing, newsgroups, and chat rooms.26 Since that period, helped by state intervention and support, the field of digital communications media has expanded at a remarkable pace. There are now more than 800 million users (57.7 percent of China’s population), who spend on average more than twenty-six hours per week online, more time than on any other medium. The Party’s desire to promote “indigenous innovation,” to use only technologies manufactured by homegrown companies rather than being reliant on foreign manufacturers, has helped make Chinese technology companies such as Lenovo, Huawei, and Xiaomi major competitors within global communications markets. The Party’s stated goal is for China to become an “innovation oriented society” and a “world leader in science and technology” by 2050.27
The figures are dizzying, but the sobering fact remains that the governors of despotic regimes remain concerned about the disharmonious effects of digital media on the political order. They are profoundly ambivalent about communicative abundance. With good reason, as we are about to see, they fear that the more citizens go online, the more the power monopoly of the rulers is open to challenge. That is why the frightened rulers of Iran for the first time (in November 2019) shut down internet access to 95 percent of the population but kept open internet usage to government departments by using their National Information Network, a restricted domestic digital infrastructure sometimes referred to as the “halal net.” The fear of public resistance explains why despots put political pressure on national and foreign information technology companies to censor, filter, and control the expanding flows of data exchanged on the web. It is also why officials in practically every despotism insist that a key government priority is to establish a firm regulatory framework that (in their jargon) improves “management of new network technologies and applications,” especially through improved “emergency response” systems that handle “sudden incidents” and (as Chinese Communist Party officials say) “maintain stability” (wéi hù wěn dìng).
It’s also why citizens who refuse to play the game are subject to a wide assortment of informal and legal punishments, ranging from official warnings, daily harassment, and hefty fines to years spent behind bars. Networking citizens who actively raise and engage issues of public concern can quickly find themselves in trouble. Exemplary punishment of individuals is a favorite deterrent. Not even netizens backed by millions of followers are automatically safe, as Charles Xue, an outspoken, wealthy Chinese American entrepreneur known online as Xue Mansi, found to his great personal cost. In 2014, in a well-known case, he was arrested and imprisoned for eight months on charges of “soliciting prostitutes.” Few independent observers believed this; rather, they judged that he was being punished for blogging complaints about the Party’s failure to promote political reform. Xue was paraded on television and forced publicly to admit his sins, which included, among other charges, spreading online rumors and losing sight of his place in society. He was told to admit that his huge online following (more than 12 million people) didn’t make him superior to the state, and that his online behavior deserved punishment because it risked producing “social chaos” (shè huì dòng dàng).28
Easily the best-known censorship tools used by the new despotisms are elaborate electronic surveillance systems, known officially in China as the Golden Shield (jīn dùn gōng chéng) but commonly referred to elsewhere as firewalls. These countrywide electronic barriers filter and control information flows so that all digital data traffic in and out of the country passes through a limited number of gateways controlled by ISPs, specially programmed network computers, or routers. The architecture is sometimes likened officially to a system of rules and regulations for policing automobile traffic, but the key difference is that under these conditions digital media users are often left in the dark about the routings and rules of the road.29 Invisibility is the controlling norm; the banned keywords and websites are kept secret. Unless users have access to leaked memoranda, they never know whether the pages they are searching for are unavailable for technical reasons or whether they have encountered government censorship. Their computer screens simply display a common error message (such as “site not found”); or they are greeted by these words: “According to relevant laws, regulations, and policies, the system doesn’t show the content you are searching.”
The algorithmic filters used by despotisms in Russia, Iran, China, and elsewhere spot homonyms and synonyms used by activists to tunnel through censorship walls. The filters are continuously reviewed and upgraded, with added features such as the ability to detect, discover, and block virtual private networks (VPNs), which are used routinely by citizens to access web services beyond the established firewalls. The tussles confirm the rule that uncertainty is a key ingredient of the spirit of despotism: consistent with their gaslighting methods, censors use “flexible” or “open” censorship to keep everybody guessing. Although some websites (such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, or Wikipedia) may be permanently blocked, especially because they publish material deemed politically too close to the bone, official lists of censored websites and keywords are not fixed. Some sites are normally accessible but then blocked at more sensitive moments, as for instance happened in early 2013 when the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend published an open letter criticizing the Party’s rewriting of its New Year’s editorial, headed “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism.” The newspaper’s website was promptly shut down, officially because its license had expired, and such terms as “Southern” and “Weekend” were suddenly blacklisted.30
Under despotic arrangements, such measures are normal; constantly tweaked, “flexible” controls that predetermine which information citizens can download, read, publish, or distribute are commonplace. Censors frown upon anonymous users. Government regulations demand that users wanting to build a website must register with internet regulators in person and present their ID. Real-name registration is often a legal requirement for internet users when uploading videos to online platforms. The same rule applies to all mobile application developers and users of microblogs and instant-messaging tools.31
The systems of censorship naturally require the cooperation of digital technology companies. Official documents stress the need to be permanently on the lookout for threats to “sovereignty” or “social order.” Foreign companies, such as Cisco Systems, the world’s leading supplier of networking management and equipment, are caught up in this system; so, too, are tech giants such as IBM, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.32 They are expected to share their surveillance technologies and user data with the state; they are also required to exercise self-restraint and to act as zealous gatekeepers of the political order. Companies that refuse to cooperate with the state may find their business operating licenses withdrawn. Refusal to comply with official requests can be costly, which is why many foreign companies (or their local legal subsidiaries) cooperatively share information stored in their own databases with the ruling powers. Prominent cases of collaboration have included Cisco’s sale of internet surveillance gear to the Chinese government in the early 1990s; the support of California-based Yahoo! Holdings for Chinese prosecutors who sentenced the journalist Shi Tao to ten years in prison for leaking a government censorship memo on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre; and Google’s prototype Project Dragonfly app, designed to conform to Chinese censorship rules by automatically “blacklisting sensitive queries” and filtering websites blocked in China.
Local media companies tend to be just as compliant. Not only do these merchants of media blackout offer up information when it is officially requested, they also fuel the whole censorship and surveillance system by zealously filtering data and / or storing users’ logs for future use by the authorities.33 In China, Sina Corporation and Tencent are examples. Offering microblogs and instant-messaging services to millions of users, they operate rumor-control and website-cleaning teams that employ thousands of staff (perhaps up to seventy thousand censors, the rule of thumb being two censors per fifty thousand users) whose job is to block forbidden content day and night.34
We return here to a foundational idea of this book: despotisms are not systems of denial and repression. Censorship and internet shutdowns aren’t their whole story, or even the most interesting part of the story of how they handle the unfinished digital communications revolution. Despots in fact make every effort to beguile and bewitch their subjects into accepting their regimes of power. The most sophisticated despotisms—Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Russia, and China—strive to be publicly attractive. They want to be cool. Seduction, not repression, is their preferred method. It is an old art in new forms. Historians tell us that the despots of the Byzantine Empire were always decorated in pearls and the colors purple and white. Early modern Russian despots bathed themselves in the splendor of glorious entries, coronations, weddings, name days, funerals, and sumptuous ceremonies such as the Blessing of the Waters. The new despots practice the old art of seduction using new technical means. Television, radio, print, and digital platforms are the media of their political performances and their political calculations.
The most obvious examples of media seduction are those moments when the leaders act as if they are Dolce & Gabbana models who mount the catwalk and stride with their heads high, purposefully looking into the distance, moving their hips to impress. Why do they stage performances in this way? How come Viktor Orbán likes soccer so much that he arranges for television channels to film him watching matches live with political friends (his team, Puskás Akadémia, usually wins)? Why do leaders want to join Vladimir Putin by flaunting their athletic abilities to score goals at the local hockey rink? Why does Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong daily feed his million-plus Facebook friends with reassurances about building a strong and united and secure Singapore, a vibrant global economy backed by a more caring and inclusive society? It is hard to know to what extent the rulers do so out of fear of the people they rule, but their skittishness is unmistakable. They are well aware that wrong moves, like a shout from a mountain, can unleash an avalanche of revolt.
Hence leaders think and talk in terms of “guiding the people” by experimenting with novel communications methods, shepherding the people by winning their hearts and minds. They do more than try hard to control the flows of information upon which their means of administration and popularity depend. The cleverest despotisms go beyond firewalls, censoring information, and government propaganda, drawing on state-of-the-art tools for “smart filtering” of the internet. In Iran, for instance, the rulers know that their attempts at blocking American-based social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are routinely bypassed by tech-savvy Iranians using VPNs. So, rather than institute a blanket ban on these sites, they experiment with strategies of censoring what the official news agency IRNA calls “criminal and unethical” content. This has the added advantage of treating public communications as an early warning device, as the raw material of total surveillance, even as a virtual steam valve for venting grievances.
Operating within a tangled and tortuous media topography, the ruling powers build twenty-first-century equivalents of the petitioners’ bench cantilevered from the wall of the Palazzo Medici in Florence, a gesture to public space by the Medici rulers that ensured that their complaining subjects sat and waited in full view, fully exposed, against giant walls that made them look utterly insignificant. Despots of our time use infinitely more sophisticated versions of the same practice of repressive toleration. Yes, they vigorously guide and control digital media, and they keep millions in the dark. Rough hands are reserved for the dissenters, who face wall-to-wall public indifference and hostility; they are a minority that always ends up flamed, jobless, disappeared, or behind bars. But so long as information producers and spreaders stay inside the published rules and regulations, and keep their distance from the invisible electric fences, they are safe, and tolerated.
Here another difference between the new despotism and the old totalitarianism is clear. These are not systems of power whose rulers crudely order firefighters to locate and burn books while most subjects are glued to their two-way spying televisions (worlds dramatized a generation ago in George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). Despotism grants subjects the freedom to bellyache and vent their concerns. Blowing off steam on the internet is functionally useful for the rulers. So is carrying on noisily about problems. Steam and noise are more than early warning detectors. They enable rulers to learn how better to rule.
Scholars and human rights activists living beyond the borders of these despotisms often ignore the artful new strategies because they fail to see that all’s not calm within the new despotisms, which tend to generate substantial social resistance. Why? Simply because one of the unintended effects of the rulers’ taste for tight surveillance and control is that they spark organized public pushback by digital activists who are less than satisfied with the way things are. These are China’s wǎngmín, or web people; in Russia, famously, they were dubbed by a popular TV presenter, Vladimir Solovyev, as “two-percent shits”; in Iran, the world’s leading jailer of female journalists and bloggers, online activists are called “webgardan” (web-bāzān). Harnessing a wide range of available tools, including smartphones, tablets, computers, and sophisticated software, and brushing aside the risks of punishment, these digital activists fling themselves into daring campaigns that spread messages to a wider imagined public, sometimes with dramatic effects. Their actions demonstrate that state censorship can be interrupted. This they do by cleverly applying so-called circumvention technology, including mirror sites and VPN software, to sidestep state censorship and gain secure and full access to banned websites and unfiltered search engines such as Google. Media storms are the result.
It is important to grasp that this online resistance isn’t simply the refusal of censorship. Lives online are linked; activists never walk alone. Every denunciation of the rulers’ incompetence, every picture or video of officials abusing their power, every single whisper of discontent has the potential to go viral, to become a digital mutiny. The complaints are always difficult to control because their content is copied, shared, commented on, and expanded with other information. An example: the netizens of Iran who use Instagram, the filtered but not blocked photo-sharing site owned by Facebook, create @RichkidsofTehran, a page brimming with photos of rich young Iranians flaunting their wealth. The censors take down the site. Then a cat-and-mouse game begins, with the launch of a new dedicated account, @RichkidsofTeh, that publishes much the same material. Workarounds are common, as when the Turkish government ban of Wikipedia prompted activists to spread the counter-news to millions of users that they could still have access simply by typing a “0” or “1” before a Wikipedia link—either 0wikipedia.org or 1wikipedia.org. Users in Turkey and elsewhere take screenshots of deleted posts and then upload them as images. If certain keywords are blocked, users invent new coded terms, such as, in China, “getting rice drunk” (committing a crime) and “grass-mud horse” (f—k the Party).35 The examples highlight an important and unending dynamic: as government censorship tactics grow more sophisticated, so do activists’ strategies of cat-and-mouse resistance, which sometimes have “swarm” effects, which can quickly turn into rowdy media tempests the rulers call “mass incidents.”
Like their geomagnetic counterparts, the digital mutinies are brief, politically charged disturbances that suddenly erupt online and quickly spread through daily life in “media events” that rattle officials and may even rock the foundations of the whole political order.36 The arrest and trial of Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai in early March 2012 had this effect: online media carried many tens of thousands of anti-government comments and even rumors of a possible coup in Beijing, to the point where the government was forced to resort to social media blackouts.37 Impressive is the way digital storms of this kind can and do erupt from local posts. During the past two decades, scores of protests known as anti-incineration campaigns began in this way in various parts of China.38 Storms sometimes quickly take on a life of their own. In January 2015, a sanitation worker in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou was savagely beaten by a fellow citizen who was asked to stop spitting seeds onto the street pavement being swept. The government-run television network CCTV reported the story through its Weibo account. It beckoned its viewers to show sympathy for the hospitalized worker by sharing these posts with friends. This produced a wholly unexpected reaction: many online activists used the invitation to criticize CCTV’s style of reporting and the government’s ineptitude in improving the living conditions of sanitation workers.39
Digital mutinies can suddenly erupt from far graver matters too, especially when citizens demand that government officials do a better job of listening and make good on their own stated goals of improving the lives of the people, rather than just focusing on the wealthy. During the twentieth-anniversary independence celebrations in Kazakhstan, riot police dressed in black fired on striking oil workers in the town of Zhanaozen. The resulting massacre (dozens of workers died and nearly a hundred were seriously injured) triggered a digital media storm, which grew so serious that the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev invited bloggers to visit the town in the hope that their online reports would help quell the disturbances spreading like wildfire to other cities. The president’s son-in-law Timur Kulibayev, head of Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund, Samruk-Kazyna, which manages energy companies and state assets, was fired, along with the regional governor and heads of the national oil company Kazmunaigaz and several local officials held responsible for the massacre. Public relations were later handled in accordance with advice proffered by Tony Blair, who was paid for his suggestions.40
There are moments when the whole People’s Republic of China is similarly rocked by people power in digital form. A striking example was the mid-2018 vaccine scandal centered on Changsheng Biotechnology Company, whose baibaipo vaccine was found to be below required standards. The previous year this company had received 48.3 million yuan in new government subsidies designed to boost the market position of vaccine companies throughout China. Its executives had financial interests in other vaccine corporations. That was why Changsheng was initially protected by the State Drug Administration and by the local Changchun drug administration, which ordered only a small fine (3.4 million yuan). “We are deeply ashamed,” said the company in a stock exchange announcement, adding that the defective product had been discontinued. There was no mention of a recall.
Such obfuscation triggered mayhem on social media. All hell broke loose. Within hours, a WeMedia article attacking the company was viewed over one hundred thousand times, the limit displayed by WeChat. The public mood was well summarized by a Weibo user: “If the state does not protect its citizens, how can we love our country?” By the next day, Changsheng’s website displayed a 404 page, and the WeMedia article had been scrubbed. Lawyers Tang Jingling and Yu Wensheng, who had previously been convicted of “inciting subversion” for exposing previous corruption affecting other vaccine products, remained behind bars. Then Chinese state media and local authorities sprang into action. They urged Weibo users to “not let anger and panic spread.” The People’s Daily called on local regulators to “rapidly take action, do a complete investigation, and announce authoritative information in a timely manner to pacify public anxiety.” Premier Li Keqiang chimed in with talk of “illegal and criminal acts that endanger the safety of people’s lives.” Xi interrupted his state visit to Rwanda to order severe punishments “to safeguard the public interest and social security.”41
An earlier incident displayed the same media-storm logic. In Zhengzhou, Henan province, Lu Jun, the head of a city planning office, saw his career swept away in 2009 by a digital media storm triggered by a questionable response he gave to a radio journalist. When asked during an interview why his council had redirected funds originally allocated to build houses for the poor toward a new plan to build luxury apartments and villas, the bureaucrat planner refused to give reasons, instead attacking the journalist with an ill-chosen taunt: “Who are you speaking for? The Party or the people?” he asked. There was mayhem, with wǎngmín all over China weighing in, many of them reminding Lu that the Party is the people.
The public occupations of Hong Kong’s streets and squares during the summer–autumn 2014 Umbrella Movement, and the equally dramatic protests of 2019 in support of civil society, social justice, and free and fair elections, were undoubtedly the most serious digital storms the rulers of China have so far faced. The networked (dispersed, flexible, and distributed) qualities of the nonviolent protests relied heavily on creative experimentation with digital media. Drones and the encrypted Telegram app were used for the first time in China to organize and publicize crowd actions; at one point during the protests, citizens even responded to rumors that the local Hong Kong government was about to cut the city’s cellular networks by downloading the Firechat app, which uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology to allow smartphone users to connect anonymously by relaying messages from one user to another without a cell signal or internet connection.42
These digital mutinies prompt obvious questions: Why are the massive media apparatuses of the new despotisms unable to prevent media storms from happening? How come despots, far from exercising complete control over their subjects, occasionally find themselves cornered, as they did during the huge public debate in early 2015 triggered by Under the Dome (Qióng dǐng zhī xià), an online documentary about pollution from coal-fired power plants that was watched by at least 150 million Chinese viewers, then later blocked by government censors? Why is it that such censorship sparked even greater fury, which resulted eventually in an assurance by Premier Li during a press conference that the Chinese government would do much more to tackle pollution?43
The sharp questions require measured answers. We have seen repeatedly how rulers who proudly claim to be the servants of the people do all they can to silence collective expressions of disaffection and complaint. They understandably worry about media storms and their incitement of collective action; they are well aware these digital mutinies can provoke wider civil unrest and public calls for openness and democracy. Hence all online posts, regardless of whether they are for or against the rulers, are subject to censorious measures. Yet digital mutinies still happen. The reasons are often circumstantial; the courage, technical skill, and sheer determination of digital activists are important drivers as well. But something much deeper is at work, and it has to do with the networked quality of the digital media that are at the heart of the new communicative abundance.
To understand why this is so, we need to consult the Canadian scholar Harold Innis, who long ago noted how different historical forms of communication have different structuring effects on the daily lives of people.44 His insight that when people communicate with others they are as much shaped by their tools of communication as the tools are shaped by people is vital for understanding why under despotic conditions digital mutinies are chronic. Skeptics who say digital media can be used equally for “democratic” or “authoritarian” purposes, or who say that under “authoritarian” conditions online activists are in effect mere “slacktivists,” who stand little chance of changing the world using smartphones, links, and clicks, underestimate this point.45 They fail to see that although the rich and expanding media environments of the new despotism are interlaced with sophisticated business and government control strategies, the digital communications networks upon which they depend are, at their core, distributed networks that defy single centers of control.
The key technical point here is that well-developed, distributed communication networks are integrated through multiple nodes that enjoy a measure of mutual independence. That means that when for any reason nodes “malfunction” or are “disabled,” for instance by censors, the rest of the network continues to operate. It also means that any information sent through a distributed network (blockchain, for instance) by digital activists can quite easily bypass a node that is controlled or has been rendered unavailable. In distributed networks, it follows that power, the ability of actors to do things with information, is never fully controllable through central regulation. Communication power is promiscuous. The capacity to act is spread laterally throughout the whole network, which tends to be both dynamic and “flat” in the sense that it has little regard for predefined hierarchies of power.46
The deep dependence of the new despotisms upon distributed networks they cannot fully control helps explain the bewilderingly large number of media storms bedeviling their rulers. Of course, the ruling officials always have the option of shutting down the operating networks, as has happened several times in the past in China, in the regions populated by Tibetan and Uighur majorities. The trouble is that such fail-safe firewalling proves in the end to be both self-paralyzing and technically impossible: the digital networks cannot be controlled outright by any single user or group of users. Digital dissent is always possible, especially given that the whole system of state-regulated capitalism is thoroughly dependent upon digital networks. Unplugging them would have ruinous economic and political effects, raising troubling questions about the governing competence of the rulers.
In the age of communicative abundance, distributed information networks tie the hands of despots, which helps explain why they can no longer straightforwardly rely on violence as their ultimate resource. True, power is often viewed as the ability of actors to achieve certain self-defined ends despite resistance from others.47 The exercise of power backed by force is regarded as a zero-sum battle: the strong triumph over the weak. In this view, the power of some requires the weakness of others, so the greater the rulers’ power, the weaker the people’s resistance. That, say the champions of this orthodox view of power, is the lesson of the crushing violence used in Chechnya, Tiananmen Square, and Taksim Gezi Park. Its effectiveness in crushing resistance proves the timeless truth of Chairman Mao’s famous maxim that political power ultimately comes from the barrel of a gun.
The formula is unconvincing. Even when despots are tempted to use violence to keep order, their growing functional dependence on distributed information networks makes them highly vulnerable to opposition from their critics and opponents. Government censors do use sophisticated algorithms to sift through the personal data of millions of people, but a single post can stop them in their tracks, embarrass them, and force them to recalculate their position. A media storm is often just a quick click away. So too is confirmation of the old rule that power is the ability “not just to act but to act in concert.”48
Under despotism, censors must continuously adapt to this resistance. Remarkably, it forces them to use digitally networked media not just as means of propaganda and control but also in cleverly “democratic” ways. Digital media are used as learning mechanisms, as listening posts, as a means through which people are urged to chat and to vent their grievances against the government, to move closer to the rulers, even to fight against their corruption. In each and every case, the overriding purpose of such tactics is to win public support, to draw digital activists into a cat’s cradle of praise, denunciation, and control, all in the name of the rulers serving the people.
Some of these phantom democratic tactics function as early warning devices. Under conditions of despotism, as we have seen, leaders denied free flows of information badly need intelligence. It is recorded that the Baghdad caliph Harun al-Rashid (c. CE 763–809 solved this problem by venturing into his city’s taverns disguised as a commoner. What he drank or discovered is unrecorded, but what is certain is that today’s despots do much the same, though with great sophistication and on a much-expanded scale. They employ, at various levels and in various branches of the state’s bureaucratic apparatus, “cyber units,” police agents and hireling bloggers who monitor and influence opinions on the web, sometimes from inside the headquarters of major internet companies. Their aim is to map and understand the underlying causes of dissent, rather than attempting to smash it with an iron fist. Such agents might be described as salaried state meteorologists on the lookout for digital storms that threaten to capsize the ship of state.
Chinese government officials working in “emergency response centers” (yīng jí lǐng dǎo xiǎo zǔ) perform much the same forecasting function. They watch for signs of brewing unrest or angry public reactions. Their job is to deal with digital activists who use sophisticated proxies and other methods to avoid censorship, spread salacious tales of official malfeasance, and quickly circulate online jokes, songs, satire, mockery, and code words. So-called rumor refutation departments pitch in, scanning posts for forbidden topics and issuing knockdown rebuttals. Their aim is to take the wind out of the sails of those who accuse the rulers of hypocrisy, who call on them to listen to the people and to live up to their promises to provide harmony, material well-being, and a good life for everyone.
Other innovations go beyond the role of forecasters or early warning devices for those who govern. Their function is instead to deal with public complaints by demonstrating that the rulers listen to the people and are ready to remedy their public grievances, above all by collecting and circulating public information. The field of digital communications is seen by despots as a vital resource for gauging people’s thoughts, cares, worries, and grievances, as a medium that makes it “much easier for governments to interact with residents and thus improve their governance.”49 Remarkable is the way government officials publish microblogs to release authorized information and to solicit feedback from people. Study Times, the newspaper of the Central Party School in China, speaks of the urgent need for officials to get involved in the business of influencing public opinion—for instance, by employing Zhou Xiaoping, Hua Qianfang, and other big-time bloggers as spreaders of positive energy, paying them according to their productivity as representatives of the “silent majority.”50 Governing officials also cultivate digital means of gathering and spreading useful public information. An example is the official microblog of the Beijing Emergency Medical Center, which earned high praise for its role in quickly informing concerned citizens in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan. The government body known as the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs does something similar. Its Blue Map app, designed to inform citizens in real-time about water quality, local sources of pollution, and emissions from polluting companies, has been downloaded many millions of times. The data collected through the app, which enables users to input updates via their phone, is then shared with hundreds of companies in the power, steel, chemical, and petrochemical fields, to encourage them to cut levels of contaminating emissions.51
Still other digital innovations function to stimulate public involvement by luring bloggers and other subjects inside the structures of government. E-consultations, online Q&A sessions, virtual petitions, and online webcast forums run in this direction. Clothed in talk of “listening to people’s voices,” “answering people’s questions,” and remedying “public grievances,” these mechanisms show that under despotic conditions digital media can be used not just as tools of top-down decision making and control but also as a way of involving people “from below” in the processes of government administration. The southern Chinese province of Guangdong, known for its innovative public involvement schemes, uses public policy “network hearings” (wǎng luò tīng zhèng), broadcast live, with hand-picked presenters expressing their views on proposed reforms, with the public invited to make comments and to vote online for the policies they support. Similar innovations have happened in the Yangzi Delta cities of Hangzhou and Nanjing, which use electronic “mayor’s mailboxes” to promote bottom-up feedback, make public administration more accountable (gong sí), and persuade people that local government is actually efficient and effective.
Another trend appears to be gaining ground in the new despotisms: the deployment of digital platforms for encouraging people to scrutinize government officials and procedures. Here the paradoxical aim of rulers is to expose their own malfeasance and to take firm action against misconduct by governing officials. Pioneering examples are the anticorruption web reporting platform (www