The internet amplifies existing political power rather than transforming it

Evidence

His experiences made him into a skeptic, and he soon became outspoken in his belief that dictatorships would benefit most from the digital world. “The internet does not and cannot replace politics,” Morozov argued. “It augments and amplifies it.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 489

Academic Evgeny Morozov had long predicted these developments. Morozov grew up in Belarus and began his career at an NGO working to promote democracy through independent journalism. His experiences made him into a skeptic, and he soon became outspoken in his belief that dictatorships would benefit most from the digital world. “The internet does not and cannot replace politics,” Morozov argued. “It augments and amplifies it.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 489

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the counter-case to Marx’s omnivore-monoculture thesis: blanket cultural flattening may be an artifact of the internet amplifying, not erasing, existing structures.
• DEFINE: Morozov’s aphorism offers a compact counter-frame to internet technological determinism that Marx’s status-mechanism thesis should test against.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 489
• XREF: connects to: Internet communication reflects rather than transcends offline power relations — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 58; Democratic institutions can successfully reclaim authority over the digital future from private power. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 185; Online participation follows the same winner-take-all hierarchy the old media had — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 967 (+6 more)