Tom Friedman Forgets to Read Evgeny Morozov

In his latest op-ed piece in the NY Times, Tom Friedman is shocked - shocked! - to find that Facebook and Twitter alone are insufficient to establish a democracy or a functioning civil society sector in Egypt. Tom should have read Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion" before expressing his surprise publicly. Morozov steadily, consistently and completely demolishes the notion that the Internet is inherently democratizing - for many of the same reasons Friedman ignores. The distributed architecture of the Net is wonderful - until you hit a national firewall - eg, China, Iran, North Korea. Going gaga over tech's ability to mobilize people quickly ignores the facts of power on the ground (witness Iran's abortive "Spring") and downplays (dangerously so) the ability of the state to control the physical space as well as cyberspace. Moreover, building democracy is a process, not a result - it is the messy clashing of interests, making of tradeoffs and hopefully insuring some levels of freedom while actually trying to govern societies that have been closed to people participation for years. Democracy doesn't sprout up overnight (how many former Soviet Socialist Republics are truly democratic? Is Hungary backsliding on its democratic underpinnings?), it is a hard slog through muddy terrain and must be defended constantly. Tom, read Morozov's book. It's disheartening but utterly convincing. Then you (of all op-ed writers) won't be surprised when Egyptians of many stripes give up on their Facebook/Twitter-induced "revolution". To quote The Who: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". The Net doesn't change that.