On Iran's Twitter Revolution

Something I'd sort of thought before but that following the Daily Dish's coverage of the Iran situation really drove home is what a psycho Sullivan is. "the central event in modern history"?! Give me a break. Green neckties?! My goodness.

[H]ow much will Iran change in ways that are beneficial to America's interests?

Of course, the problem is that having Iran actually becoming like the United States is not in America's interest. We think well of ourselves, but we tend to throw our weight around, don't mind that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy human life on earth, aren't very good at minding our own business and otherwise behave in ways that we object to when others behave that way. As Mel Brooks said "It's good to be the king," but somehow, kings don't like competitors.

MBunge, I've been reading Sullivan's coverage of this issue for a couple of days, and he has considered the possiblity that Ahmadinejad won, though it is clear that he rejects it. He has noted numerous times that the numbers he's giving may not be accurate, because they are unconfirmed.

Andrew has been wonderful on this issue, and the blog entry excerpt above is one of his best.

If people who write "blogs" are "bloggers", then people who write on Twitter are "twits".

The Iranian masses with their Twitters are a slim segment of the overall population. The rural masses and urban lower classes are huge Ahmedinejad supporters----and let's not forget that the real power in the regime belongs to two groups: the Guardian Council and the Revolutionary Guards. They have the guns, and they have the steadfastness of purpose. As the saying goes: (Armed) Rigorists Always Win.

Guns beat Twitters, every time.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

freelunch,

Right because America is inheriently evil, and the Chinese would be much better suited to the job of world hyper power. People who worry about the amount of nuclear weapons America possesses have a distorted sense of what the real threats to the planet are.

"these techno saavy young people could become the despots of tomorrow and use the technology as a tool of repression - but given the nature of the technology I suspect the revolutionaries of tommorrow will figure out how to bypass that too."

The risk of modern communication technology doesn't seem to be despotism as much as it does anarchy and degeneracy. The degree to which Sullivan is consumed by what's going on in Iran is a good demonstration that some folks need physical and temporal distance imposed on their thinking, so their flights of fancy don't run away with them.

Mike

Why does it matter so much that any changes in Iran be 'beneficial to America's interests? What if such changes were only beneficial to the promotion of beauty, truth, and goodness? Not that I wish harm upon America, but it doesn't seem that that is the best priority to have in judging world events.

The world is full of cynics. I am glad that Andrew can always be relied upon to get caught up in revolutionary fervor. He has chronicled the plight of resistance to oppression from Burma to Iran.

I have been a long time reader of the Dish, Andrew is quite sanguine about the chances of success; he knows they are slim but believes in the possibility. The majesty of the visuals, thousands risking life and limb to stand against a brutal regime knowing they have slim chances, is powerful.

Tweets might beat guns. Gandhi and Mandela both brought down brutal regimes without a single gunshot. Routing for the underdog means defeat is expected and Andrew is the mascot rallying the online audience. It doesn't always end well but triumph is unusually sweeter for it.

on a related topic, utopic thinkers also thought television and airplanes would solve social alienation. read this thoughtful critique of technology's democratic potential or not, excerpted here.

Texting Toward Utopia
Does the Internet spread democracy? Evgeny Morozov

In 1989 Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”; later, Bill Clinton compared Internet censorship to “trying to nail Jell–O to the wall”; and in 1999 George W. Bush (not John Lennon) asked us to “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread.”

Such starry–eyed cyber–optimism suggested a new form of technological determinism according to which the Internet would be the hammer to nail all global problems, from economic development in Africa to threats of transnational terrorism in the Middle East. Even so shrewd an operator as Rupert Murdoch yielded to the digital temptation: “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” he claimed. Soon after, Murdoch bowed down to the Chinese authorities, who threatened his regional satellite TV business in response to this headline–grabbing statement.

Some analysts did not jump on the bandwagon. The restrained tone of one 2003 report stood in marked contrast to prevailing cyber–optimism. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s, “Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule,” warned: “Rather than sounding the death knell for authoritarianism, the global diffusion of the Internet presents both opportunity and challenge for authoritarian regimes.” Surveying diverse regimes from Singapore to Cuba, the report concluded that the political impact of the Internet would vary with a country’s social and economic circumstances, its political culture, and the peculiarities of its national Internet infrastructure.

Carnegie’s report appeared in the pre–YouTube, –Facebook, –MySpace darkness, so it was easy to overlook the rapidly falling costs of self–publishing and coordination and the implications for online interaction and collaboration, from political networking to Wikipedia. Still harder was to predict the potential effect of the Internet and mobile technology on economic development in the world’s poorest regions, where they currently provide much–needed banking infrastructure (for example, by using unspent air credit on mobile phones as currency), create new markets, introduce educational opportunities, and help to spread information about prevention and treatment of diseases. And hopes remain that the fruits of faster economic development, born of new information technologies, might also be good for democracy.

It is thus tempting to embrace the earlier cyber–optimism, trace the success of many political and democratic initiatives around the globe to the coming of Web 2.0, and dismiss the misgivings of the Carnegie report. Could it be that changes in the Web over the past six years—especially the rise of social networking, blogging, and video and photo sharing—represent the flowering of the Internet’s democratizing potential? This thesis seems to explain the dynamics of current Internet censorship: sites that feature user–generated content—Facebook, YouTube, Blogger—are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes. A number of academic and popular books on the subject point to nothing short of a revolution, both in politics and information (see, for example, Antony Loewenstein’s The Blogging Revolution or Elizabeth Hanson’s The Information Revolution and World Politics, both published last year). Were the cyber–optimists right after all? Does the Internet spread freedom?

The answer to this question substantially depends on how we measure “freedom.” It is safe to say that the Internet has significantly changed the flow of information in and out of authoritarian states. While Internet censorship remains a thorny issue and, unfortunately, more widespread than it was in 2003, it is hard to ignore the wealth of digital content that has suddenly become available to millions of Chinese, Iranians, or Egyptians. If anything the speed and ease of Internet publishing have made many previous modes of samizdat obsolete; the emerging generation of dissidents may as well choose Facebook and YouTube as their headquarters and iTunes and Wikipedia as their classrooms.

Many such dissenters have, indeed, made great use of the Web. In Ukraine young activists relied on new–media technologies to mobilize supporters during the Orange Revolution. Colombian protesters used Facebook to organize massive rallies against FARC, the leftist guerrillas. The shocking and powerful pictures that surfaced from Burma during the 2007 anti–government protests—many of them shot by local bloggers with cell phones—quickly traveled around the globe. Democratic activists in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe used the Web to track vote rigging in last year’s elections and used mobile phones to take photos of election results that were temporarily displayed outside the voting booths (later, a useful proof of the irregularities). Plenty of other examples—from Iran, Egypt, Russia, Belarus, and, above all, China—attest to the growing importance of technology in facilitating dissent.

Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life.

But drawing conclusions about the democratizing nature of the Internet may still be premature. The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet— aside from developing good measures of democratic improvement—has been to distinguish cause and effect. That is always hard, but it is especially difficult in this case because the grandiose promise of technological determinism—the idealistic belief in the Internet’s transformative power—has often blinded even the most sober analysts.

Consider the arguments that ascribe Barack Obama’s electoral success, in part, to his team’s mastery of databases, online fundraising, and social networking. Obama’s use of new media is bound to be the subject of many articles and books. But to claim the primacy of technology over politics would be to disregard Obama’s larger–than–life charisma, the legacy of the stunningly unpopular Bush administration, the ramifications of the global financial crisis, and John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate. Despite the campaign’s considerable Web savvy, one cannot grant much legitimacy to the argument that it earned Obama his victory.

Yet, we are seemingly willing to resort to such technological determinism in the international context. For example, discussions of the Orange Revolution have assigned a particularly important role to text messaging. This is how a 2007 research paper, “The Role of Digital Networked Technologies in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution,” by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society described the impact of text messaging, or SMS:

By September 2004, Pora [the opposition’s youth movement] had created a series of stable political networks throughout the country, including 150 mobile groups responsible for spreading information and coordinating election monitoring, with 72 regional centers and over 30,000 registered participants. Mobile phones played an important role for this mobile fleet of activists. Pora’s post–election report states, ‘a system of immediate dissemination of information by SMS was put in place and proved to be important.’

Such mobilization may indeed have been important in the final effort. But it is misleading to imply, as some recent studies by Berkman staff have, that the Orange Revolution was the work of as a “smart mob”—a term introduced by the critic Howard Rheingold to describe self–structuring and emerging social organization facilitated by technology. To focus so singularly on the technology is to gloss over the brutal attempts to falsify the results of the presidential elections that triggered the protests, the two weeks that protesters spent standing in the freezing November air, or the millions of dollars pumped into the Ukrainan democratic forces to make those protests happen in the first place. Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life, and no real elections have been won there either; otherwise, Ron Paul would be president.

I had Steve's response too, Rod, and to put it more generally, I find it disconcerting that you can switch from eternal and world-historical frames to nationalistic frames so easily. It suggests that you could easily confuse them, in the manner of what Sully calls Christianism.

Also, I don't know if this was an accident of your grammar, but you said the Iranian *people* will likely not "cease to be a threat to the region, to Israel, or the US interests." The Iranian people are among the most modern and peace-loving in the region.

On the more specific topic of twittering and the role that it's playing, it's easy for those who pretty much live online (like Sullivan seems to) to get swept up in the online activity.

But technology, specifically technology that pushes communication tools farther and farther down to the individual, does play an important role in political change. The French Revolution would not have happened without the printing press. In communist Czechoslovakia, the government knew this: they heavily restricted access to photocopiers for just that reason. In this country, we saw the Republicans master '90s technology as they used computers to organize get out the vote efforts and target fundraising, while Democratic organizers first delivered the primaries to Obama and then helped deliver the general election through activism that was radically decentralized and organized largely online.

Obviously it takes far more than blogging and commenting and twittering online to effect change. But one of the liberating things that the Internet does is tell you that you are not alone and that there are people who think like you that you can reach out to and mobilize. It's a critical first step to making change happen (though by no means the only step).

That's why twitter has been so important to the Iranian protests.

Cannoneo: "I had Steve's response too, Rod, and to put it more generally, I find it disconcerting that you can switch from eternal and world-historical frames to nationalistic frames so easily."

Rod's as fickle as a twist. :)

Both of these candidates are approved by the mullahs.

Nobody is talking about dumping an "Islamic republic".

None of the women are tearing of their hijabs.

We have a lot of people in the West of every political stripe making a whole host of unsupported assumptions that fit their beliefs. And they aren't considering the perspective of these Iranians might not apply.

Think of it like this; if you're a modern American and you read the abolitionists' literature in the antebellum period, it's very compelling, and from our perspective obvious and rightful. But in their time, these people (while proven correct by history) were the best read and best educated people of their time. We understandably relate to them and agree with their ideals. But the abolitionists were reviled by the common folk in the larger society in both North and South as busybodies looking to start a war over slavery. We may relate to these well-spoken enlightened people, but that doesn't mean we can assume they were anything more than a small elite in their time. They did leave a better paper trail than the larger society, but that doesn't mean they were numerically superior in their time.

We see signs of technology and messages about freedom and protest and instead of seeing them in their context in Iran, try to relate them to our experiences and beliefs, trying to impose a framework we can understand. And we may not have a full reading of their culture to do that, such that it defies a Western understanding. Technology and culture aren't the same thing. Absent such a cultural perspective, we're merely wishfully guessing.

We have learned nothing from Iraq. Both sides of ths Weastern spectrum expect to be greeted as heroes.

Before anyone gets all upset, that last line was a joke. But the rest wasn't, and is pretty much the mainstream of political opinion on such topics in both political parties, whether that's admitted by either or not.

Yes, Cecelia, she teaches at a university. But it's still something quite different than what we think a college is or should be. Again, you are making assumptions and trying to relate Iran to your own experiences. This is called wishful thinking.

And Mousavi wasn't exactly Mr. Wonderful when he was in power. I'm sure Imadinthehead has a wife too.

Speaking of being fickle as a twist, I find it interesting that liberals are now in favor of "freedom" again, after having been opposed to it from September 11, 2001 to January 20, 2009.

I'm in favor of freedom.

What I'm not in favor of is sending an inadequate number of insufficiently equipped US troops into a foreign nation to overthrow a regime under false pretexts in the name of freedom.

John E.,

Your anecdotal testimony about yourself is neither here not there.

The overlap between those who sneered derisively at the purple thumbs in Iraq but who now want everyone to wear green ties or green ribbons is enormous.

And I don't see how anyone honest could not recognize that as fickle as a twist.

Most liberals -- like most conservatives -- are not fundamentally in favor of freedom or any other grand principle or ideal.

They're fundamentally in favor of their side "wining" on whatever terms "winning" happens to take -- whether it means being "for" freedom as liberals profess to be now, or whether it means, as it did for liberals from September 11, 2001 to January 20, 2009, being "against" freedom, as they professed to be then.

John E.,

There's no need for you to "look forward" to "verification" of my claims.

There's a thing called Google that could help you with that, right now.

So knock yourself out.

John E.,

In other words, you could (A) avail yourself of the verification you claim to want, or you could (B) indulge in paranoid fantasies that prevent you from having even momentarily to question what seems to be your comfortably self-flattering world-view.

It's no skin off my teeth which one you choose.