The Googlization of Everything

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The Revolution will not be Faxed

When I started to research this book, I assumed I would berate Google for failing to adhere to the highest standards of corporate accountability for consorting with the government of the People's Republic of China and assenting to restrictions on access to certain sites within China. After all, the Tiananmen Square events in May and June of 1989 forged my political consciousness more than any other political event of my life. As journalism scholar Jay Rosen has said, "there are 1945 democrats. There are 1968 democrats. I am a 1989 democrat." I am a 1989 democrat as well. On the same day, June 4, that the Chinese military slaughtered hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Beijing, the freshly legalized labor union, Solidarity, overthrew the communist government of Poland in a fair election, thus sparking a series of democratic revolutions throughout the world. By October 1989, East German dictator Erik Honecker resigned and Hungary became a republic. By November, the pro-Apartheid National Party in South Africa began dismantling the racist system and inviting full political participation by the oppressed black majority. Also in November 1989, the "Velvet Revolution" began in what was Czechoslovakia and the Communist Party announced it would hold free elections in December. Brazil also held its first free elections that December after 29 years of military rule. The year ended with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu stepping down and Czech poet Vaclav Havel stepping up to assume the presidency of Czechoslovakia. These and other events contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet empire, and eventually the Soviet Union itself, by late 1991.

So in 1989, as a young man of 23, I could not have been more optimistic about the future of my world, my country, and the prospects for justice and democracy. As stories of successful dissidents emerged from the accounts of these revolutions, it became clear that new communication technologies played a part in many of them. The proliferation of fax machines in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, for instance, received much of the credit for facilitating activism and awareness among networks of dissidents. One business writer voiced this commonly held belief by boldly stating, "The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is the direct result of new information technologies." To a naïve young American such as myself, fascinated by new technology, devoted to the belief that free speech can be deeply and positively transformative, this simple connection between a new technology and stunning historical events was irresistible. Such a techno-optimistic story tracked well with other simplistic accounts I held in my mind at that time: that the Reformation and Enlightenment were "driven," or "made necessary" by the emergence of the printing press in 15th-century Europe; that mass-market pamphlets such as Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" were essential contributions to the birth of the American Republic in the late 18th century. Of course, this was far too simple an explanation for the sudden (and, in many places, temporary) spread of democracy and free speech. Historians of both politics and technology knew the story was more complex than this. But I didn't.

I was not wrong to take account of new communicative methods or technologies as factors in rapid social and political change. But as a 23-year-old, I, like many others, put too much emphasis on them and discounted the remarkable human struggle, raw courage, and ideological effort that had a larger effect on the overthrow of oppressive regimes - especially in places such as South Africa and Brazil. Historian Tony Judt, in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, does not consider new information and communication technologies such as the fax machine central to the story of Eastern European liberation. He credits different key factors in each country of Eastern Europe. In Hungary, Judt explains, a youthful reform movement within the Hungarian Communist Party pushed the government at the weakest points. In East Germany, the decision to alter a very analog technology - the Berlin Wall - and allow Berliners to flow back and forth by late 1989 pushed the Communist Party to the breaking point. All of this local change was aided by a steadily weakened Soviet state. Judt reminds us of the powerfully corrosive influence of the Soviet Unions' folly-filled war in Afghanistan. He shows that it substantially weakening the iron grip the Kremlin had on its European satellites. In addition, change was rapid within Soviet society itself, regardless of the communicative technologies at work. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev invited the growth of a nascent "public sphere," Judt writes, by engaging in "glasnost," or a policy of openness, thus allowing dissent to flow in Soviet society through clubs, meetings, and publications. "Glasnost" even liberalized what appeared on Soviet television - a far more powerful and universal medium than the fax machine. Gorbachev himself decided to break the Communist Party's monopoly on information and narrative, Judt wrote. Once Moscow was weakened, dozens of other factors - including the efforts of labor unions, religious leaders, poets, and criminals - could chip away at the foundation of Communist oppression across the Soviet empire.

Judt does confront the most surprising thing about the revolutions of 1989 (in Europe, anyway) and asks why they happened so fast - despite the distinct causes and conditions in each nation. He concludes that communication technology did play a central role in the speed and spread of the revolutionary spirit. But it was not the fax machine that motivated people to rise up: it was television. When viewers in Czechoslovakia and Germany could see their own local uprisings presented on their own televisions in their own living rooms, they encountered what Judt calls "instant political education, drumming home a double message: 'they are powerless,' and 'we did it.' " Just as importantly, Eastern Europeans watched the events in Tiananmen Square unfold along with the rest of the world. They were struck, as I was, by the bravery of the protesters and the brutality of the state. They were no doubt inspired by peaceful revolts that seemed to spring forth all over the world at exactly the same time. The simultaneity of global television gave them both inspiration and a set of models to emulate. For the first time, they knew they were not alone.

The lesson here is that by focusing on the novelty of communicative technologies and assuming that their simultaneous arrival in a place causes - rather than coincides or aides - rapid change, we tend to downgrade the importance of something as obvious and powerful as cultural policy, opening a gate, or executing disastrous and debilitating war in Central Asia.

The introduction of a powerful and efficient mode of communication, such as the fax machine, can amplify or accelerate a movement as long as that movement already exists - has form and substance. Technologies are, of course, far from neutral. Yet they don't have simple dynamics of "freedom" or "oppression" built into them. The same technologies, as we have already seen, can be used to monitor a group of people and connect them in powerful ways. The way a society or a state uses a technology is as important as the specific design of that technology.

So communicative technologies matter to the struggle for freedom, but how and how much? It's important to remember that within any oppressed society, unsettling ideas and criticisms exist and flow, even when impeded by technology and law. They seem and flow through the cracks in the system. And every system has cracks. As Robert Darnton wrote about systems of censorship and their flaws before the French Revolution, "it was not simply a story that pitted liberty against oppression but rather one of complicity and collaboration."

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