“Net Delusion” Review: The Authoritarian Trinity and the return to the Cold War » Article » OWNI.eu, Digital Journalism. This article was originally published in The Meta-Activism Project About a third of the way through his book The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov references the Orwellian “trilogy of authoritarianism”: censorship, propaganda, and surveillance.
This is a useful framework for analyzing digital repression, but Morozov only tells half the story. Unlike in his chapters on the mythology of the Iranian Twitter Revolution and the neo-con school of cyber-optimism, Morozov is in journalist mode here, rather than attack mode. His chapters on the trinity are original and empirical, yet nhe does not present the other side’s ideas. In this post I’ll review Morozov’s insights on the three pillars of digital authoritarianism and then present the other side: why there is still legitimate reason for optimism about the power of digital activists to combat these forces.
As a follow up to the previous post on vintage computer brochures I wanted to... Computer History Museum.