Authoritarian states learned to use the internet for their own ends

Evidence

Belarusian theorist Evgeny Morozov—who knew very well that the end of communism did not go the way most people in Washington, DC, and California thought it had (Aleksandr Lukashenko has been entrenched in power in Belarus since 1994)—tried to push back against this wave of uncritical boosterism for California businesses. These people had their Cold War history very wrong, he said. Authoritarian governments are not passive simpletons waiting to be overthrown, and they could learn to use the internet themselves, he pointed out. Whether rich Westerners realized it or not, situations even worse than the governance of a stable authoritarian state were possible, including civil war or failed states. But if he was given any attention within what became a tsunami of praise for the technology sector, it was so he could be attacked with reckless abandon. In the mainstream press, the internet guys were almost always the good guys. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 297

Categorization

• DEFINE: Morozov’s prescient 2010-era rejection of internet-determinist optimism, later vindicated by surveillance states using these tools.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the broader theme of how liberating technologies get repurposed by the powerful. — connects to: The internet was built by US Cold War counterinsurgency agencies — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 287; Paid digital mobs were a cheap, high-return political tactic worldwide — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 698; Authoritarian states deploy data colonialism as effectively as market democracies — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 154 (+6 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 297

Broader Connections

• Authoritarian states deploy data colonialism as effectively as market democracies #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 154
• Social media’s democratizing promise reversed into authoritarian crackdowns and troll-army suppression #exemplifies (0.82)
• Communist states replaced political coercion with technological domination #expands (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 158
• The internet amplifies existing political power rather than transforming it #corroborates (0.78) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 489
• Authoritarian political systems can shape minds that preserve the status quo #expands (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2932
• Authoritarians accept forced messages they agree with as sincere #expands (0.72)