The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Updated with a new Afterword

“The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran. But as journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov argues in The Net Delusion, the Internet is a tool that both revolutionaries and authoritarian governments can use. For all of the talk in the West about the power of the Internet to democratize societies, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. Social media sites have been used there to entrench dictators and threaten dissidents, making it harder—not easier—to promote democracy.

Marshalling a compelling set of case studies, The Net Delusion shows why the cyber-utopian stance that the Internet is inherently liberating is wrong, and how ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of “Internet freedom” are misguided and, on occasion, harmful.

• To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
• Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
• Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know®
• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
• No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
• Consent of the Networked
• The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications