Technocracy Isn't Policy
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnsih.Blogspot.com
The celebration of the Arab Spring is built on faith
in the redemptive ability of enhanced communications
technologies to create a transparent global culture.
To the true believers on the New York Times
editorial page, it is axiomatic that cultural
revolutions driven by communications technologies
will be liberal. That anything which breaks down
barriers must be liberal.
Technocracy as foreign policy has become the
standard reaction to turmoil and instability in the
Muslim world. Whether it's Hillary Clinton talking
about the need to have relationships with the
populations of entire countries or Thomas Friedman
sketching out yet another vision of a New Middle
East, the misplaced enthusiasm is everywhere. At the
heart of it all is the idea that social media is
leading to the dawn of a new age.
This Twitter-centric narrative assumes that social
media is ushering in a new age of progressive people
power. But that's hardly the case.
The successful revolutions of the Arab Spring have
brought down secular governments and are in the
process of replacing them with Islamist or military
dictatorships. And a prime mover behind them is
Al-Jazeera, a global news channel run out of the
territory of an absolute monarchy. The Twitter
activists have already been left behind. The power
remains in the hands of those who had it all along.
Whether it's the Egyptian military which forced
Mubarak to resign or the defectors from the Libyan
government who have achieved international
recognition, power is built on power. Not on
Twitter.
Even Wikileaks, which seemed to usher in a new
informational world order, had its scoops
distributed through the dead tree vector of 150 year
old newspapers. Newspapers which took the material
and turned on its distributor anyway. The world did
not change dramatically for it. Diplomatic cables
had been leaked before, just not on this scale. But
unlike the Zimmerman Telegram, nothing in Wikileaks
started a war. Which means that a single leaked
diplomatic cable from 1917 was more devastating than
all of Wikileaks.
The acceleration of information distribution and the
expanded social organizing toolset of the internet
are not elementally liberalizing. Rather they are
empowering. And like all tools, they empower those
who use them effectively and aggressively.
The United States is hobbled competitively in the
fight by its own faith in technocracy. When Hillary
Clinton wonders why America doesn't have anything as
effective Al-Jazeera, the answer is simple. It's
because Al-Jazeera pursues a clear and definite
agenda. The United States has no agenda anymore
except to win friends and influence people. And
that's not an agenda, it's a strategy. But to the
technocrats gaining influence is an end in and of
itself. And they can't gain that influence when they
don't know what they want to do with it.
The Obama administration is more clueless when it
comes to national interests than any previous
administration. Which is why it's incapable of
influencing anyone. While Russia and China know what
they want and set out to get it-- American diplomats
turn into philosophers of futurism lecturing on the
wonderful new transparent world, as if that were
their objective. And indeed it is. But that isn't a
national objective, it's a philosophical preference.
Liberalism has supplanted the national interest and
American diplomats still think that the same
technologies which disrupted the national consensus
on values will do the same thing worldwide. And they
are as right as they are wrong. Because it isn't the
communications tools themselves that did it, but
their monopolization in the hands of a liberal
elite. But outside the United States and Europe,
there is no liberal elite to monopolize
communications. Instead the monopoly rests in the
hands of totalitarian governments and fanatical
ideologies who are just as keen to force their way
of life on the rest of the world.
Social media and global communication are more
effective in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood,
the Emir of Qatar or Vladimir Putin than in the
hands of the reformers. This flies in the face of
social media as social liberation, but it's the
truth. Tools are agnostic. And the disruptive
elements of the internet and associated mobile
technologies do not mean that they are perfect
weapons of liberalization. Only that they are
perfect weapons.
It is just as easy to distribute a lie, as the
truth. Any social grouping is limited by its own
biases. And a dictatorship may as easily employ
social media to crush dissenters, so long as it has
plenty of loyal followers. Technologically is a
tool, not a destiny.
The technocracy of Western foreign policy experts
neatly blinds them to reality. That is why the fake
blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, was so effective at
playing into the false linkage between technology
and revolution, between political instability and
reform, that dominates their view of the world. A
dominance that is entrenched by their misreading of
their own recent history as being progressive,
rather than a revived feudalism under a socialist
red flag.
Progressive liberalization as the political destiny
of states confronted with modern technology is an
idea that should have died a decade ago during the
first techno-adrenaline rush of the internet, when
it was clear that this was simply not happening.
Since then the global village has filled up with
dictatorships ruling over populations that have
internet cafes and 3G phones. But the Arab Spring
has played too neatly into the globalist package
sold by the experts. It finally delivers what they
were promising all along, liberalization through
globalization, the metal and silicon hand of
technology coming down on the liberal side of
history.
Global Communication is indeed changing the world,
but not necessarily for the better. Or the freer. It
is easier than ever to be heard, but harder than
ever to be listened to. Accessibility is still
bounded by gatekeepers. And as Wikileaks
demonstrated, the identity of the gatekeepers hasn't
changed all that much. It's easy to put a message
out there, but the sheer volume of messages reduces
communications to a garble of noise. Web 2.0 used
social media to filter and index the messages,
turning everyone into a participant in the cultural
wars.
The Brave New Digital World is just as welcoming of
Islamists as of rationalists. The vast amounts of
information are not a barrier to medieval fanatics,
instead the information becomes an ocean from which
everyone may draw whatever information suits them
and use it to populate their own ecosystem of ideas.
Each faction carries on its cultural war for
dominance in a world that has no more boundaries and
against a West that no longer believes in anything
except being fairminded.
Where Islamists use technology as a means to bring
about their preferred social and political order,
the Western liberals who are the most enthusiastic
believers in transparency through technocracy want
it to bring about some form of global consensus.
Which it will, just not one that allows them to keep
their heads.
The defect is not in their intelligence, but in
their analysis of history as a force sweeping their
way. That messianic view has characterized the left
all along and given it a sense of destiny. But the
analysis was always a bad one. The historical
analysis depended on a cycle of revolutions
liberating new groups of oppressed peoples to
eventually create an absolute equality. But
revolutions are just as likely to lead to tyranny as
to freedom. A principle that the left's own
revolutions have shown to be true.
Western liberalization was driven less by population
revolution and more by economic prosperity. But in
countries where prosperity is limited to those at
the top, revolutions revert to the feudal,
Communists and radical socialists become a new
feudal nobility. Or in the Middle East, Islamists.
Technology cannot lead to universal participation in
nations without universal literacy. And even
universal participation does not overcome the
disparity of power. Nothing truly does.
The romance of the technocracy reassures liberals of
the inevitable historical destiny of their cause.
Which is why they ignore all contradictory trends.
Their willingness to see global culture as a destiny
and a destination, rather than a battlefield,
sustains the myth and makes the defeat of human
rights around the world seem like a victory. Even
the cultural expansionism of the Muslim Brotherhood
is seen as a positive thing if it leads to a global
culture.
In championing technocracy over national interest,
they have become just as agenda agnostic as the
technologies that make the global cultural
battlefield possible. By embracing a post-American
world, they have opened the door to a global
cultural war, rather than the global cultural order
that they have envisioned.