Prometheus of Democracy?

Armed with youth, vigor, and the power of the Internet, how could these protesters lose? But lose they did, and decisively.

It turns out that Twitter-based activism is easily managed in a country where the government has near-total control over Internet access. Indeed, Iranian leaders soon realized that the Internet could be a despot’s best friend. They created blogs to spew pro-government propaganda and learned to scour social networking sites as an easy way to track the regime’s opponents, and their online friends as well.

The crushing of Iran’s Twitter Revolution has come as a severe disappointment to liberal citizens of the West. We’ve been bred to the idea that ever-greater access to information inevitably leads to the spread of freedom and democracy. But in his sardonic, powerful new book, “The Net Delusion,’’ Evgeny Morozov rips this idea to shreds. He shows how the world’s autocrats have learned to love the Internet. Nations like Iran, China, and Venezuela now embrace it as a tool of propaganda and public surveillance. They’ve even learned to use the Internet as a social safety valve, where disgruntled citizens can blow off steam without posing a serious threat to the establishment.

Meanwhile, many Westerners cling to a simplistic fantasy that truth alone will set people free. Morozov thinks it’s because we learned the wrong lesson from the fall of the old Soviet Union, a brittle old dictatorship that was terrified by the free flow of information. Histories of the Cold War often note that the spread of technologies like the videocassette player and the photocopier exposed many Soviet citizens to Western news and entertainment, and their images of freedom and prosperity.

These works often suggest that information technology played a major role in the Soviet collapse.

But as Morozov notes, that decline had far more to do with a decaying economy and an elite no longer willing to commit mass murder to stay in power. Western media played a marginal role at best. He even cites research showing that residents of communist East Germany who could pick up West German TV broadcasts actually became less likely to rebel; they were too busy watching “Dallas,’’ “Dynasty,’’ and “Miami Vice.’’