Technology and the prospects for democracy

...in Bucharest, the uprising against Ceausescu was staged in a makeshift television station...

...Already today, in the United States, nearly 40 percent of homes have at least one personal computer...

...It is as hopeless and as exorbitantly expensive for governments to develop a control-technology as it is to develop the various generations of anti-anti-anti . . . missile missiles...

...Even if others might try to get their hands on this type of technology, the police could easily prevent them from doing so...

...But by now, of course, it was too late or, perhaps, Gorbachev's predecessors were proved right: openness, including technological openness, would mean the end of the Soviet political system...

...But this brief exchange prompted me to reflect on the relationship between the already predominant information technology of our times—not only photocopiers, of course, but computers, and especially personal computers, modems, electronic mail, fax machines, video recorders and hand-held video cameras, and the now emerging world of CD-ROM "multimedia" —and the world of politics...

...The next time the clocks strike thirteen, most people will know that this merely throws doubt on all that went before...

...Imagine, in those days and until quite recently, trying to disseminate information, ideas, and political alternatives: broadcasting frequencies could be jammed, printing presses could be seized, and no one could possibly transmit television images without a vast and complex technological infrastructure...

...I have no evidence to prove this, but it is worth suggesting that, faced with this dilemma, the Soviet leadership chose the safer alternative, namely, to sacrifice economic development for the sake of political control...

...This hegemony was once maintained, under Stalin, through disempowerment and the brutal use of terror...

...The new technology will surely play into the hands of the contemporary civic reality: if once the political center ruled over the peripheries, today it is the peripheries—ethnic, cultural, economic, and, yes, criminal—that lord it over the center, though they do not yet constitute an institutionalized civil society...

...Without wishing to take anything away from Orwell, I think that there was a more profound reason for the very different role technology turned out to play...

...But whatever the precise figures, it is clear that at a time when the information "revolution," particularly in the form of personal computers, swept the Western world (in 1987, in the United States alone, there were some twentyfive million personal computers in use and more than five million were being produced each year), nothing even remotely resembling this transformation took place in the USSR...

...According to estimates, there were between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand personal computers in the USSR in 1987...

...Though still largely in principle only, we all have access now to all the information available at any one time, almost as a collective good...

...George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I work, the person in charge of the maintenance of photocopiers is a middle-aged recent immigrant from Russia named Ya'kov...

...but it will make life very difficult for such leaders and regimes...

...His reply terminated my innocence: "You're obviously not an expert on the Soviet Union," he said...

...second, these resources are easily utilized against the political center...

...It is only a matter of time before a similar phenomenon takes an irreversible hold over the former communist societies...

...Thereafter, it could neither control the dissemination of print nor the replacement of Latin by the vernacular, with all the attendant sociological consequences...

...The character of technology has been transformed so that it is more and more difficult for anyone or any single agency to control...

...in Moscow, CNN satellites effectively joined forces with those resisting the coup attempt of August 1991...

...The new technology cannot of itself prevent the rise of dictators and dictatorships...

...Moreover, in most if not all postcommunist societies, the political center is now inordinately weak both because new political institutions have not yet coalesced and because the communist experience has undermined faith in politics and made all claims to power suspect...

...Dependence on authority, on the political center and the resources it has to offer, is decreasing, making it far more difficult for the center to mobilize support...

...Of course, I am not arguing that technology is everything or even that it is an independent variable...

...and on the West Bank, I have seen Palestinian children being handed miniature video cameras by foreign journalists to photograph their own intifada...

...Once, watching him bring back to life a photocopier I had no doubt was clinically dead, I remarked to him innocently: "Well, Ya'kov, whatever the sins and failures of the Soviet system, at least it produced an expert on photocopiers...

...Imagine Soviet leaders confronting the following dilemma at some time during the recent past: in order to keep pace with the modern world economy, it was essential to introduce on a mass scale into the Soviet economy the information revolution and all its vast paraphernalia...

...The introduction of the printing press marked the beginning of literacy in Europe, a personal and collective resource that in turn would become indispensable to the creation of an industrial economy and the emergence of more democratic political institutions...

...We have already witnessed the more obvious manifestations of this: in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, students communicated with the outside world by means of fax machines...

...It was, rather, a warning and, some might claim, as a warning, it contributed to the non-materialization of that horrific dystopia...

...Soviet mathematicians and computer scientists have always had a worldwide reputation...

...Since the photocopiers have an uncanny habit of breaking down whenever I use them, I have had ample occasion to call upon his services and have never ceased to marvel at the magic he works on these machines...

...The computer, like other electronic machines, is only a tool...

...As for photocopiers, the acquisition of these was illegal to the very end, even if some dissidents managed to smuggle them in...

...But the fact that despots always begin by restricting access to information testifies to the centrality of that resource, today as in the past, as an intrinsically countervailing force...

...The "computer age" is, therefore, a revolution in the magnitude of our access to a collective good and thus a transformation of the extent to which individuals and groups need to be dependent upon agencies outside themselves...

...I suggest a different explanation, which might add a further perspective on the collapse of the Soviet Union and tell us something about the technological context of the postcommunist transition...

...The implication was clear: the more advanced technology becomes, the more it threatens to undermine personal freedom...

...It is hardly fortuitous that an era of vastly increased inclusion of groups previously excluded from power and resources is also an era during which access to information has escalated beyond anything that could have been imagined a decade ago...

...Nevertheless, it remains 268 • DISSENT Notebook essentially an empowering tool...

...No doubt, the price of even the cheapest computers is still prohibitive for most citizens, but these machines and their kindred will take root one way or another, sooner or later...

...The old phenomenon of "combined development" —whereby latecomers to a technology are able to leap over earlier "generations" and adopt the most recent advances—is already taking place, as witness the sophisticated use of television satellites...

...Politically this means two things: first, the resources of the individual have grown immeasurably...

...q Brian Morton THE EQUALIZER G ME: A CONFESSION SPRING • 1995 • 269...

...When he came to power, Gorbachev tried valiantly to turn things around...

...As against this, our technology is of a completely different scale: in 1946 the state-oftheart computer took up two thousand square feet of space and had an internal memory capacity equivalent to about twenty words...

...Not to do so would mean SPRING • 1995 • 267 Notebook that Soviet economic enterprises, of whatever size and character, could not compete on the world market and, what is more, the economy itself could not grow...

...The easier the access, the greater the diffusion of power...

...There is little reliable data about the availability of computers and all the rest in the former Soviet Union...

...Of course, the use of larger computers and of other information tools was widespread in those spheres—the military and space industries are obvious examples—where virtually nothing could be done without them...

...This cannot be because technological knowhow was not available...

...But there are other, far more subtle and profound effects that are transforming the relationship of the "computerized" individual to his or her political environment...

...Literacy did not, obviously, prevent the emergence also of new forms of despotism...

...But we have historical precedents for the ultimate impact a new technology may have in eroding the power of once hegemonic institutions...

...The spread of this machine has been nothing short of spectacular, and it will not be long before it is as common a household "appliance" as the refrigerator or the washing machine, but with more farreaching consequences for society and its political institutions...

...today, a standard silicon chip measures a quarter of an inch across and can store the digital equivalent of eight hundred thousand words while working at a speed greater by a factor of about one million...

...Nor can we attribute this "lagging behind" to the scarcity of resources: a system such as the Soviet, however impoverished, was always capable of changing priori266 • DISSENT Notebook ties and reallocating resources if it deemed the effort important enough...

...The truth is, that until I came to Israel not only did I know nothing about servicing photocopiers, I didn't even know such a machine had been invented...

...Orwell's chilling vision was not meant to be a prediction...

...In a sense, the policy of glasnost that he introduced was a reflection of the concept of "information," prevalent by now throughout the world...

...Following Stalin, the regime maintained popular disempowerment but now discovered that a socioeconomic arrangement that made each citizen completely dependent on the political center was just as effective as massive force...

...This is a worldwide phenomenon, but what concerns me here is its possible impact on the current uneasy prospects for democracy in the former communist societies...

...There is no longer any effective way of preventing the spread of information technology in Russia and the other formerly communist nations...

...We are only at the beginnings of this phenomenon—nanotechnology is yet to come—but its implications are already clear: miniaturized electronic technology and its major product, information, cannot be controlled...

...Everyone will remember the specter raised by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four of modern totalitarianism, perhaps modern government in general, mobilizing the resources of twentieth-century technology to impose its control over society and individuals...

...To take a kindred example, the invention of movable type and the printing press in Europe in the fifteenth century contributed immeasurably to the decline of ecclesiastical power: before that the Church could control the dissemination of books — information, ideas, knowledge—through its monopoly over scribes reproducing texts in a language, Latin, accessible only to a few...

...so perhaps too much should not be made of this research sample of one...

...As the old Jewish proverb says, an example is not a proof and, besides, Ya'kov had grown up in a small town in the remote Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, far from the supposedly modern offices of urban Russia...

...Considering the postcommunist transition, we can hardly ignore the impact of the computer age upon the process itself and its eventual outcome...

...The main exception to this general pattern of dependence was the spread of organized crime, as might be expected in such a system, but criminals have an interest in the preservation of a system under which they thrive and thus constitute no political threat to the regime...

...He arrived in Israel in 1990 and has been with us for some two years...

...The novel painted a bleak picture of Big Brother watching us from every corner, so that even the most private activities did not escape his ubiquitous surveillance...

...Orwell's world was still a world of what might be called "heavy" machines, too large, too unwieldy, and too expensive to be available to anyone except a government or a large enterprise or institution...

...On the other hand, to do so would mean making available to large numbers of Soviet citizens and organizations instruments that would soon jeopardize the regime's political control, its still virtually total hegemony over society...

...We should bear this in mind when assessing the prospects for democratic institutions in postcommunist societies...

...But miniaturization has qualitative, not merely quantitative, consequences...