You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (31 page)

The fall of the Berlin Wall liberated Eastern Europe, but not Belarus. It broke away from Russia, but the local strongman Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko maintained a Brezhnevian state. He ruled ‘the last dictatorship in Europe’ by censoring the press, killing opposition leaders and rigging elections. The United States and the European Union protested, but what could they do? If the men with the guns do not want democratic change, it takes other men with guns to make them change their minds. The West was not going to invade. Russia, the regional superpower, tolerated the dictator, and there was no domestic military force capable of organising a revolution.

The Web appeared to lift the dead weight of history from the shoulders of the oppressed. ‘The use of flash mobs as a tool of political protest has reached its zenith in Belarus,’ Shirky said as he explained how citizens could organise against oppression in the most unpromising circumstances. The ability of Belarusian dissidents to arrange fast, spontaneous protests via online chat-rooms and the community pages of LiveJournal inspired him. In 2006, after Lukashenko ‘won’ his third term with another rigged election, an anonymous activist working under the name of ‘by_mob’ proposed a demonstration. Instead of urging opponents of the regime to chant slogans, he suggested that they show up in central Minsk and eat ice cream. The police arrested them, as they arrested anyone engaged in unauthorised public gatherings. Activists retaliated by posting pictures on the Web of the cops leading away citizens for the anti-state crime of eating ice cream in a public place. Other flash mobs followed, and demonstrators caught the overreactions of the authorities on camera and posted them to an international audience. Before the gift of new technology, the state-controlled media would not publicise protests, nor would it report on them accurately afterwards – if at all. The local public and international observers need never know they had happened.

The new technology blew away the old advantages the state’s media monopoly gave it. Anonymous bloggers could arrange demonstrations without revealing their identities. Anyone on the Net could read about them and come along, or read accounts of the protest afterwards and see pictures and videos taken with mobile phones. Meanwhile, Shirky thought, the knowledge that electronic eyes were monitoring them limited the brutality of the secret police. Understandably impressed, he said that the Belarusian protesters were showing us that the Web was delivering freedoms that men and women once needed liberal constitutions and democratic governments to guarantee. ‘To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others. With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now the freedom of the press and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly. Naturally the changes occasioned by new sources of freedom are most significant in a less free environment.’

He could not have been more wrong. The Net, like all previous revolutions in communications technology, will change the world. But, like all previous revolutions in communications technology, it will give advantages to those who already enjoy power and wealth. As well as empowering the citizens of democracies and dissidents in dictatorships, it empowers elected governments, dictatorial regimes, police forces, spies, employers, blackmailers, frauds, fanatics and terrorists. Meanwhile the ideology of the Net activists who command attention and admiration in the West can be a sly and parochial creed which actively works against the interests of Belarusian dissidents and all others living with oppression. Worst of all, those who claimed that the ‘Age of Transparency’ had dawned did not think about how censorship works. If they had, they would have grasped that those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’ are tougher than they look. For there is one prediction about the next decade that one can make with certainty: after watching protests from the Belarus flash mobs to the Arab Spring, no dictatorship will make the mistake of ignoring social networking again.

Cyber-utopians do not study history. If they did, they would not be utopians. The one story from the past they love to recall is the tale from the Middle Ages of Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim near Bad Kreuznach in the Rhineland, and his unintentionally revealing polemic against Gutenberg’s new printing presses.

The abbot venerated the traditions of the medieval scribes. With skill and persistence, they preserved the culture and the religious doctrines of medieval Europe by copying manuscripts which would otherwise have rotted away. Their labour was arduous, and their manuscripts were expensive; only the wealthiest individuals and institutions could afford a library. Gutenberg’s movable type destroyed the scribes’ monopoly and rendered their skills obsolete. For the first time, printers could make a copy of a book in less time than it took to read it. Like the Internet, the new presses of the 1450s were a revolution in communications technology, massively increasing the ability to view the written word.

The loss of his old culture appalled the abbot. Rude mechanicals with elementary skills were supplanting holy men who had studied for years to master the art of producing illuminated manuscripts. The abbot’s polemic against the new technology,
De Laude Scriptorum
(‘In Praise of Scribes’), dwelt on the producer interest of the scribes. The wider interests of readers and authors did not concern him. He did not write about how movable type allowed an explosion in the number of books and the number of writers who could reach an audience. He did not praise the printing press for allowing readers to purchase books at a fraction of the cost of illuminated manuscripts, or for encouraging the spread of literacy. Instead the abbot praised the art of copying for allowing monks to spend their time enlightening their minds and lifting their hearts as they painfully transcribed the scriptures in monastic solitude.

To the delight of all who tell the story, the abbot did not send his manuscript to the monks so that they might labour in their cells scratching out copies by candlelight. He wanted as many people as possible to read his denunciation of the new technology. So naturally, when he completed his manuscript in 1492, he sent it to the printers, who set it in movable type so he could produce his book denouncing the press and praising scribes quickly and cheaply, and ensure that everyone who wanted to read it could obtain a copy.

A merry little tale the abbot’s hypocrisy has made. Enthusiasts for the Web use it to mock the ‘reactionary cant’ of today’s gatekeepers as they try to resist the new expressions of democratic will and personal fulfilment Web 2.0 brings. As a putdown for practitioners of my grubby trade of journalism, I accept that it is hard to better. But I notice that the excursion into history stops almost as soon as it begins. No one goes on to say what happened to Europe after Gutenberg’s presses began to roll.

Let me attempt to fill in the gaps. Try to imagine a fifteenth-century Clay Shirky or Julian Assange. Suppose he is a young monk at Sponheim, and is so enthused by the promise of the new presses that he blows a raspberry at the abbot and renounces holy orders to join the ‘Gutenberg revolution’ that is promising to bring ‘a new age of transparency’ to late-medieval Europe. If he predicted that printing would vastly increase the number of people who could write books, the subjects they could cover and the size of their potential audience, he would have been stating the obvious. If he imitated today’s Net boosters, and predicted that generals would be less likely to massacre civilians because the new technology would spread word of their crimes, later events would disappoint him. The slaughters of the post-Gutenberg wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were catastrophic crimes against humanity that foreshadowed the barbarism of the total wars of the twentieth century. They tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns never recovered. Although printing helped the Protestant cause by allowing Bibles to be distributed in native tongues, countries that saw Protestantism triumph at the wars’ end did not experience a blossoming of free speech or a flowering of civilised values. In Oliver Cromwell’s England and John Calvin’s Geneva, Protestants were as censorious as the Catholic monarchies in France and Spain, and equally determined to persecute heretics, witches and dissenters.

And if our neophiliac monk had been so foolish as to think that print would encourage political liberty, he would have been history’s fool. The most striking feature of Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries was the rise of royal absolutism in France, Castile, Prussia and Russia, and the emasculation or abolition of the medieval estates and parliaments. France had a revolution in 1789, but the Jacobin terror and the Napoleonic Empire followed. You cannot say that France achieved anything resembling a stable, liberal democracy that protected free speech until 1871. Most of Western Europe did not achieve that goal until 1945. Eastern Europe was not free until 1989. Russia is still waiting. Our freedoms are an exception, not a norm.

Absolute monarchs could live with the printing press. They could censor opponents of the established order by licensing printers or sending critics to jail for their uncomfortably enlightened views, and – here is where everyone gets the radical possibilities of new technologies hopelessly wrong – they could
use
the presses to produce propaganda on behalf of the monarchical order and its religion. The works of political and religious dissenters could still be smuggled into the country, but as long as their circulation was small, monarchs were secure.

Nazism, communism and George Orwell’s depiction of Airstrip One in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
have such a hold on our minds that we forget that most dictatorships do not want
total
control, but
effective
control. Their modus operandi is closer to France under Louis XIV or Russia under Nicholas I than to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. As in the Europe of the absolute monarchs, most modern dictatorships effectively license publishers, broadcasters and Internet service providers. They tell them they can make money as long as they protect the interests of the regime. Material from dissidents circulates, but its authors and publishers must live with continual harassment.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is typical of dictatorships old and new. It does not try to censor everything. The regime understands that the total control of communism failed because it suppressed too much. On a personal level, the men at the top in the Kremlin do not want to go back to a time when the bribes they received were worth little because the luxuries of capitalism were on the other side of an iron curtain. Their underlings, meanwhile, have no nostalgia for the 1930s and ’40s, when Stalin murdered loyal apparatchiks who were working in jobs that look disturbingly like theirs. The elite wants a safe and profitable autocracy, and will tolerate dissent as long as its effects are limited.

Opposition journalists in Russia can find work, and the Net provides an important space for critical thought. But the Kremlin controls the main sources of information, and never lets its critics forget that freedom of thought comes at a price. As in England and the old American South, libel is used to intimidate the enemies of the powerful – Art Troitsky, the country’s bravest music critic, faced defamation suits that could cost him millions of roubles and his liberty for mocking police officers who cover up the crimes of the oligarchs and artists who suck up to the governing clique. As in Western Europe, apparently liberal laws the authorities say are aimed against the hate crimes of extremists suffocate wider debates. Edward Lucas, a historian of the return of Russian autocracy, described their potential to harass thus:

As in democratic countries, a corporation that wants government favours makes sure its newspapers and its websites do not offend the mighty. The difference between Russia and a free society is that there is no prospect of the government changing, and the Kremlin’s ability to punish businesses that cross it includes the seizing of its assets and the jailing of its journalists. Businesses with close links to the Kremlin buy critical TV stations. The new owners sideline the old editors, and the coverage becomes a lot less critical.
New Times
, one of the few independent weeklies left in Russia, hired an editor the Kremlin disapproved of. The regime made its feelings clear to the proprietor. She refused to find an acceptable replacement, but advertisers rewarded her stand on principle by taking their custom elsewhere. Once the authorities had made their unhappiness plain, giving
New Times
money ‘would be commercial suicide in a business climate where official disfavour means harassment by every state agency, followed usually by bankruptcy’.

In these conditions, the best one can say about the existence of opposition websites and newspapers is that they are an advance on the blanket repression of the communist era. To exaggerate their importance is to ignore the fact that supporters of the Kremlin so dominate the old and the new media that no opposition candidate can reach a mass audience. Worse, it is to misunderstand the nature of censorship.

Putin and his mafia friends do not worry overmuch that their opponents can publish somewhere in cyberspace or in a few highbrow journals, as long as they cannot break away from the fringe and reach the mainstream. State harassment, up to and including the murder of journalists, ensures that dissidents know the consequences of ‘going too far’. Similarly, Bashar Assad’s Syria, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and the Islamists they supported did not care that anyone with access to the Net could find the Danish cartoons of 2005 with the click of a mouse. It was enough that newspapers and book publishers refused to run them, and that other artists and writers who might have satirised religion thought again before doing so. The persecutors of Ayaan Hirsi Ali wanted to silence her dissenting voice permanently. When they failed, they too were prepared to settle for warning Muslim and ex-Muslim women of the high price they might pay if they spoke out against misogyny. Go back to Roman Polanski and the Russian, Ukrainian and Saudi oligarchs England’s wretched legal profession welcomed to the High Court in London. They would, if they could, have wiped every unflattering word about them from the Web. A few tried, but for the rest the readiness of the English judiciary to punish their critics and announce that they were men of good reputation was compensation enough.

Writers in the West have already found that the Web does not set them free. Like the Gutenberg press, the Web has hugely expanded the number who can publish – and shown that while it is not true that everyone has a book inside them, they most certainly have a blog. But to reach an audience you must find a way of making yourself heard above the cacophony of millions of competing voices, and understand the importance of putting your name to your work.

An anonymous blogger can print a leaked document or run a denunciation of an abuse of power. But if the abuse is to be tackled, then the blogger or the people who have read his or her work must go out and campaign for change in public. Those who throw off the coward’s cloak of anonymity find the law of the land applies as much to them as to anyone else. If they live in a dictatorship, they run into the secret police. If they live in a democracy, they face legal constraints, and find that all the old arguments about what the law should allow or punish acquire a pressing importance.

A refrain heard in the Ryan Giggs and Simon Singh affairs was that individually, each writer or tweeter is too small to go after. Collectively, there are too many of them. That has not been true in all cases. In Britain, libel lawyers use Google alerts to flag every mention of their clients. As soon as Google draws their attention to unfavourable coverage by bloggers, they threaten critics with writs. The costs of English libel law are beyond the means of many newspapers, let alone individual bloggers, and in all but two of the many examples I know of, the blogger has retracted rather than run the risk of litigation.

The Net gives writers in democracies new tools, but it does not spare them the burden of campaigning, lobbying and enlisting support that their predecessors in the analogue age had to carry. As they try to organise reform movements, they may find that the decline of the old media is not wholly benign. The Net’s advantages are palpable. Online communities can devote more space to airing grievances than television stations and newspapers ever could. The achievements of Web-based campaigns against corruption in India and child abuse in the Catholic Church speak for themselves. Mass-circulation newspapers and national television stations in free countries, however, can put a country’s political class under overwhelming pressure. That power is fading. Replacing gatekeepers’ quasi-monopolies with the myriad of sites on the Net also means replacing one knockout punch with hundreds of jabs. The powerful of the future may find it easier to ignore the pinpricks of little websites than the bludgeon of the mass media.

Meanwhile, politically active Westerners can find that the Web seduces them away from the public they need to influence. It gives them unrestricted freedom, and then denies them the audience that makes freedom effective. The Web has made it easier for them to write than ever before – and easier still to be ignored. Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.