The Conventional Wisdom : What Lies Beneath ?

Technology will make it increasingly difficult for the state to control the information its people receive.. .. The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip. The world has changed a great deal since Ronald Reagan spoke these words in 1989. To many, subsequent events have borne witness to the truth of his prediction: authoritarian regimes have fallen around the world, while the power of the microchip has risen. The connection between these two phenomena has taken on a powerful, implicit veracity, even when it has not been explicitly detailed. A link between technological advance and democratization remains a powerful assumption in popular thinking, even amid a decline in the general " information age " optimism that characterized much of the 1990s. Specifically, there is now a widespread belief in the policy world that the Internet poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. Political leaders often espouse this notion: President George W. Bush has asserted that the Internet will bring freedom to China, while Secretary of State Colin Powell has stated that " the rise of democracy and the power of the information revolution combine to leverage each other. " 1 President Bill Clinton was also a prolific proponent of the idea that the Internet is inherently a force for democracy. 2 Business leaders and media commentators generally concur: former Citicorp chair Walter Wriston has argued in Foreign Affairs that " the virus of freedom. .. is spread by electronic networks to the four corners of the earth, " and journalist Robert Wright claims that " in all probability, resistance to the Internet's political logic will plainly be futile within a decade or two. " 3