Transcript
Discussing the Book, "The Internet of Elsewhere"
August 18, 2011
00:01:01
MICAH SIFRY: Hi everyone, this is Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum and we're on for another of our on-going series of PDF network conference calls with movers, shakers, thinkers and innovators in the politics and technology space.
This week we'll be continuing our summer book series with Cyrus Farivar who is the author of a really terrific new book, The Internet of Elsewhere and in a second I'll be bringing him into the call. First I just want to thank AT&T, our on-going sponsor for these PDF network calls for helping make them possible and remind people who are listening that we will be following your Tweets on Twitter if you use the hash tag PDFNetwork, so if you want to sort of track the conversation or throw a question in or a comment in, use that as your hash tag.
For the first half hour it will just be me and Cyrus and somewhere around the middle of our hour, I will open up the call to your question and comments and thoughts. Please make sure your phone is on mute for the time being and I'll signal you when it's time to get into the question and answer queue.
So, I have to say it's a pleasure to have Cyrus Farivar on the phone with us. Cyrus, I have followed your work for many years, especially your reporting on the politics of the internet in relation to Iran and the rise of the blogosphere there and you know, I heard about your book you know, I was very glad to see that you know that somebody like you was really tackling this problem of expanding our awareness, the development and impact of the internet of places outside of the sort of well covered path of the US and the major countries of Europe, to really go beyond that scope to places like Korea and Senegal and Estonia and Iran.
Of course, it's a real contribution to our overall knowledge about how connection technologies are developing in different paces and in different ways in affecting societies in some ways familiar, in other ways that are not so familiar.
So, I'm really looking forward to this next hour with you as we dig in a bit on the stories you tell in the book. But maybe the first thing we do is I want to invite you to tell us a little bit about your background and how it is that you came to write The Internet of Elsewhere.
CYRUS FARIVAR: Sure, well I wanted to just thank you Micah and thank you Marsha for having me as being part of this discussion. It's always a pleasure to share my work with such a thoughtful and intelligent audience.
Yes, so as you said, my name is Cyrus Farivar, I am an Iranian-American journalist. I currently live in Germany. I am speaking to you know from Cologne, Germany, which is about a half-an-hour outside of where I live in Bhone and the reason I live in Bhone is because I work for Deutsch (sounds like: avala) English, which is Germany's international radio broadcaster, and I have a weekly program in English on European science and technology news and I host a program, it's called Spectrum. You can download it on podcast if you like. You just search for DWSpectrum.
But anyway, yes, this book began a few years ago. I suppose you could say it began way back actually in 2002 and 2003 when I was still an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. I spent my junior year abroad that year, 2002/2003 in Senegal and that was the first time I'd been there. It was the first time I had been anywhere in Africa and I lived there as a student and I spent a lot of my free time in cyber cafes not only kind of because I am kind of an internet junkie like I think a lot of us on this call are, but you know, it was really fascinating to me to kind of watch how people use the internet because in a place like Senegal, most people use the internet in cyber cafes. They don't -- a lot of people don't have access at home. Some people have access at work, but fewer people have access at home.
So, cyber cafes are really a way for most people to have access and I wanted to kind of understand how and why the internet developed the way that it did in Senegal and I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis actually about the internet in Senegal.
And later on when I was in graduate school at Columbia, this kind of morphed -- I started thinking about more of these issues and really I think for me one of the early points of inspiration was reading an article in the Christian Science Monitor, this was in 2005 that was talking about how in Estonia they had declared internet access as a human right. And this was totally kind of shocking but kind of in an exciting way.
I mean, first of all, I was --
(CALL IS LOST)
MICAH SIFRY: Cyrus? Okay, we may have just lost your connection. Sorry about this folks, this is the nature of using Skype. We'll hang on a second and wait for Cyrus to redial back in.
In the meantime, I'm going to open up the Q&A if anybody has anything they want to say in the meantime.
We are having technical difficulties and we're hoping that Cyrus is going to be able to dial back in.
OPERATOR: Micah, we just got an announcement that the Q&A session is over. Does that mean you can't hear us?
MICAH SIFRY: No, I can hear everybody if you're listening on the call. The other folks are on and we can all chat right now while we're waiting for Cyrus to get back in. I thought I clear the hold on conversation.
I'm curious if you've read the book, if you have specific questions or observations that are on your mind about the book feel free to jump in.
ALEX HOWARD: Hi Micah, Alex Howard here. I have read it and as with your book, The Aid to Transparency, I really appreciated the more global perspective reaching far beyond the issues that people are dealing with domestically in the U. S.
MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, and to me that was what was really eye opening and confounding slightly because it really shows that there are other paths to development. I mean, I'm hoping to get into those questions with Cyrus here. If he doesn't manage to get back on, we may have to reschedule this call.
So, it's just such an irony to be relying on technology to talk about the impact of technology, but yes, I mean the way that the sort of hyper speed and ubiquity of connections in Korea for example, you know, country where they would scoff at the degree of broadband access that we have here in the United States, how that has played a role in altering political trajectories, that's one of the themes that comes up in the book quite strongly.
But also sort of the dark side in Korea, the whole topic of internet addiction, which apparently is a more serious phenomenon than I had been aware assuming the data that Cyrus sites as accurate.
Hang on here -- other people who read the book with any observations? Comments you want to share?
CYRUS FARIVAR: Apologies. Sorry, I don't know what happened. All of a sudden my internet just died. I'm on a friend's computer and I don't know, maybe it's the lightning or something. I have no idea. Anyway --
MICAH SIFRY: Okay, well we mugged for the cameras for a little while there and started talking about your book. But let's get back to the train of the conversation in terms of the inspiration for you in pursuing the subject.
CYRUS FARIVAR: Yeah, so I was talking about Estonia and I was talking about how I had heard about how the internet was declared a human right in Estonia and I wanted to figure out again how and why did this happen and of all places in the world, why Estonia? Why this tiny country of 1.3 million people that I think few people that I myself knew nothing about.
And so this was kind of the seed initially of looking at these countries and then Iran was tacked on both for personal reasons because I have family there, my father's from there; but also of course the interesting political history that's been going on in Iran over the last -- especially the last couple of decades and kind of how the internet has evolved there in terms of political speech and blogging and all the rest. And then South Korea because South Korea is the world's most wired country. It has the most widespread, cheapest and most easily accessible broadband access of anywhere in the world.
MICAH SIFRY: So, what I was trying to say first struck me most in the book and I'm going to do a very quick sort of broad set of reactions, but the things that jumped out to me -- I mean, in the case of Korea the impact of ubiquitous high speed, affordable broadband. You know, let's talk about Korea for a little while. It may be the most advanced internet enabled country in the world, though Estonia obviously sounds like it is up there, too. But Estonia is a much smaller country so let's put that to the side for a second.
I mean in terms of Korea, what would you say -- I mean, are we looking at a place that you know, this is a harbinger of what America might be like if indeed we get to gigabit broadband streams at cheap prices? I mean, what I got from your picture of Korea was a place where you know, in some ways politics is sped up, media is transformed. We see an outsider politician manage to breakthrough with a great deal of help from what today we would call you know, online social networking. What we saw there happened -- presages what took place for Obama back in 2008 and this is back in 2003 in Korea.
So, there's this kind of speed up and intensification of grassroots populism in politics. And the other thing I got from your section on Korea which surprised me was the degree to which internet addiction, you know having this cheap, plentiful supply of high speed "crack" if you will, that it's a real problem and that it's enough of a problem that you know it's been recognized and it's being dealt with as a syndrome there.
I mean, am I exaggerating in those readings or do you think that that's the takeaway you would take from what you learned about Korea?
CYRUS FARIVAR: Well, I would say that you haven't -- yeah, that's true. I think that -- I mean I just Tweeted actually -- Marcia, if you could -- I forgot the (inaudible) but I just Tweeted -- (overlapping remarks) right -- I just Tweeted an article from the New York Times that's dated May 5th, 2003 and the headline is "America's Broadband Dream Is Alive in Korea." And the article basically talks about how high speed internet access has pervaded throughout Korean society and in many ways the United States is still lagging behind.
And yeah, like you said I think that what's interesting about what's going on with respect to Korea both in terms of -- yeah, like you said, on the political side and what Micah's is referring to is yeah, there was this presidential campaign a few years back that was organized actually initially in a what's called a "PC bong," which is like a Korean equivalent of a cyber café.
And it's funny because there was this political group for a guy who later on became President of Korea, Prime Minister of Korea, a guy by the name of Romo Hume and there was this political kind of group or fan club if you will that was called (sounds like: Rosamo) which is a Korean acronym that means People Who Love Ro -- that was the guy's name. And there first meeting place was actually in a PC bong, in this cyber café where lots of Korean kids, boys mostly, would come and play computer games and just kind of hang out.
And it struck me that maybe -- I don't know if this is too much of an exaggeration but it reminded me at least of kind of the role that 19th century Parisian salons played in kind of amongst a certain kind of intelligencia class that that was the venue that they chose for their first meeting and I think that's very telling of Korean society in terms of being this very wired place.
And yeah, on the one hand that's great, you know? People can get together, people can organize, people can establish political discussions, can use social networking and all that stuff. But as you said also there's a great negative side, which is that yeah, you have some strong examples of internet addiction; you have people who -- again, young boys who are using the internet so much and playing these competitive computer games so much that they're -- that they've become isolated from the rest of their normal lives.
And the Korean government has opened up a series of psychological places where kids can go to get treatment and even -- there are these camps, these kind of therapeutic camps where you can go and you know, they send these boys and they learn about basketball and chess and camp fires and stuff and you know, they're just kind of away from the internet for a while. And they learn how to be kind of normal kids again.
And it's really interesting, we haven't seen that as much or at all I guess to the same degree in the U.S., but I do wonder though if maybe there's something there that we need to watch out for if we take this kind of to that extreme.
MICAH SIFRY: I mean, the effects that you describe of the internet in Korea, you're talking in a number of cases of things that happened a couple of years ago. Has it kind of hit a plateau or would you say that we should still look at Korea as giving us a picture of what the road five or ten years' ahead might look like for us here or for people elsewhere.
I mean, you know politics there seems to have sort of absorbed this phenomenon now, it's not -- you know, the bloom's off the rose if you will, the specialness of it.
I mean, the candidate that you talked about, he ultimately you know, he fell into some disgraced and committed suicide later, right?
CYRUS FARIVAR: Right, right, that's true.
MICAH SIFRY: I mean, it's a strange story. So, I'm just wondering you know, what other lessons you would tease out about the Korean example and not to be culturally prejudiced or anything, I -- you know, I think we can learn from many cultures, but is that degree of internet ubiquity does it make it a more attractive place to live in your mind? You know, were you, as an internet junkie yourself, was it just like being in paradise or --
CYRUS FARIVAR: In some ways. I mean, I'll give you a good example -- the very first moment that I arrived in Seoul, you know, I got on the subway, I was coming in actually form a different city doing interviews for this book, in fact. This was April, 2007. And I had just come in off the bus from a town called Daijan which is about two hours' bus ride south of Seoul.
And I went back to Seoul and I got on the subway and one of the very first things I saw was a man in a business suit, he appeared to be coming home from work and he was standing there on the subway, holding his mobile phone on a moving subway car, I don't know how many hundred feet underground, moving at I don't know how many miles per hour, but you know fast and far underground, watching a live baseball game on his mobile phone. And as a baseball fan, I thought this was great.
And at the time I was living in Oakland, California is the Bay Area and the Bay Area as you know likes to pride itself on being kind of the tech hub of the United States and in some cases, the world. And at that time at least you couldn't even send a single test message on the BART going between Oakland and San Francisco and here this guy was watching live baseball over his phone on a moving subway car. And that just really blew me away.
So, I think that that has kind of pervaded -- people take it for granted that you can do that. And this -- sorry, go ahead.
MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, I was just going to ask a sort of policy (inaudible) question, which is -- and who owns the infrastructure? Is this all government -- I mean, just to compare again -- is this because they had a central government plan to make this level of broadband possible? Is it from competition? I mean in a nutshell, what should we take from Korea's success in reaching that level of internet service?
CYRUS FARIVAR: Yeah, I think if you look at how the internet has been deployed in Korea over the years, yes, there was a deliberate government plan in many cases. In fact, a lot of the reason why there is so much broadband access, there's a couple reasons: 1) Korea, as you know, by geography, Korea is a small country, especially compared to the United States. I mean, I'm pretty sure New York State is bigger than all of South Korea.
And so as a result, you have much less geography to deal with. So, that helps. The other thing is that most Koreans -- the overwhelming majority of Koreans live in kind of dense, urban environments, right? They live is apartment high rises, in big cities like Seoul, Deijan Bouson and other places like that. And so this last mile problem we have in many parts of the United States where it's difficult to get access to people who live in remote areas is less of an issue. So, I think that's kind of one advantage for them.
Another thing is that they made a point of really encouraging companies -- of the government creating companies and then as a way to kind of spur competition in the early 1990s to bring broadband access out t o everybody, to make it available, they was -- they in fact, used initially some fiber optic cable that had been laid as part of the power company, the national power company, KEPCO, the Korean Electronic and Power Company, I think -- or Electricity and Power Company I think it's called.
And they had some kind of dark fiber if you will and they were able to use that for internet. And it was laid initially just as kind of an internal corporate network. It wasn't initially designed to be part of the national kind of internet infrastructure.
And I think something else that's kind of interesting is that the Korean government has also made a big effort to create -- and I talked about this a little bit in the book -- to create something called new Songdo City, they've basically reclaimed this bay up -- not actually very far from the North Korean border in a place called Inchan which is where the Seoul International Airport is. And this is designed to be this "U" city, this ubiquitous city.
It's an artificial city designed to have networking technology, RF ID cards, electronics payments on your mobile phone, English is going to be the main language, people can file building permits and business permits in English and they're really doing it as a ways t o attract international business and immigrants and saying, 'well, we're close to the major airport,' and this kind of thing. And this is this kind of futuristic city. We'll see how that pans out. I mean, it's still being built. It's a massive, massive project.
But yeah, it'll be interesting to watch how that goes.
MICAH SIFRY: Well let's turn to the other example in the book of ubiquitous internet connectivity. You know, I think of this as another place where maybe we get a glimpse of the future, which is Estonia; obviously much smaller, 1.3 million people as you described.
And the book, I should say by the way, you know, we're not giving you enough credit for having unearthed and explained history of the development of the internet in places like Estonia and Korea. I mean, you really do get to meet the sort of far sighted engineers and entrepreneurs and government players who through one way or the other end up being the key people who lead their country's development. It's really one of the reasons why this book should be on your bookshelf, if you are like the folks listening, you know and internet politics junkie.
But Estonia, the big story there I think for those of us who are interested in how the internet can transform and modernize how government works and how citizens interact with their government is the degree to which they've seemingly embraced a fairly robust kind of "e" government.
I wonder if you'd describe that a bit. How does that work there? It isn't just that they've moved to the option of online voting in elections, right? There's a great deal more in a number of ways where the government is genuinely integrating connection technology into how it actually works, right?
CYRUS FARIVAR: That's exactly right, yeah. So, yeah, there's a couple things to consider: one is on the government side, so yeah, there is e:voting and I'll get to that in a moment in Estonia. So, every Estonian can vote on the internet from wherever they are in the world using their Estonian digital ID card, I'll talk about that in a second.
But yeah, on the government side, there is this concept of what they call "e" Parliament or "e" government. And what that means is it's really changed the way the Estonian government establishes or writes legislation. So, in order to understand this you have to just briefly understand how the Estonian government works.
In the U.S., we have Congress and Congress proposes bills and then they get reconciled with the Senate and then they go to the President's desk and he signs them, right? That's how laws get made. And it --
MICAH SIFRY: I'm glad you cleared that up, by the way.
CYRUS FARIVAR: (Laughter) that's what I learned during School House Rock when I was in 5th grade.
Anyway, but in Estonia what happens is you have -- so they have a Parliamentary system and so there's a Cabinet of Ministers, so you've got the Minister of the Economy, Minister of Transportation, Minister of Defense and all the rest and the Prime Minister, of course.
And so each minister can propose a bill within the Cabinet and so they want to propose a defense spending bill or they want to propose some new transportation construction or whatever it is and so they discuss it amongst themselves and once that passes the Cabinet then it gets passed on to the Parliament and then the Parliament votes on it and then if they approve it, it becomes law.
And so what happens is they decided several years ago in the early in -- I guess now we're in the second decade of the 21 Century, so in the first decade in the (inaudible) I guess, they decided -- they said, well, you know, we're printing out all of these documents -- actually, I think it may have even been earlier than that.
Anyway -- I'll have to look it up. They decided -- you know, we're typing up all of these laws and these bills and these proposals and then we're printing them out and we're coming to these meetings and then we're putting them back online and this is just silly. Why don't we just have an entirely electronic system, you know? Why don't we discuss these bills online before we discuss them in person.
And so in a matter of months, this system was set up using Linux boxes and the room where they have these Cabinet meetings, you can imagine just a u-shaped conference room so they've got tables and chairs around and the Cabinet Ministers are sitting there and then they've got their aids behind them.
And so if you can imagine this u-shape, at each station there's like a Linux box stripped down in it's -- you know, you can't do a whole lot with it but what you can do with it is you can access the government's online discussion board. And so the idea is that bills are proposed and even if a Minister -- whether they're in the room, whether they're at home with their family, whether they're, you know on -- somewhere else in the world, they can log on to this website and see the text of this bill that's being proposed.
And the rule that they established was they said, 'okay, if bills are not worth being discussed online before the meeting actually convenes, if people decide this is not worth discussing online and no one is going to contribute any kind of discussion then basically we're in agreement that it's okay. Nobody has voiced any opposition, so it's going to pass, right?
And so that meant that a lot of bills that would have taken more time to -- that were relatively uncontroversial that would have taken more time to discuss in person, automatically passed. And they told the people who work in this environment told me that these meetings that used to go an hour-and-a-half, two hours sometimes even longer, typically now are under an hour. So, they kind of streamlined that process.
That's just kind of within the government. And then later on in 2002 / 2003, the Estonian government got going with this digital ID card project where every Estonian citizen and legal resident of Estonia has a digital ID card. So, if you can imagine just like your American driver's license, it's about that shape and it's got your name and your photo and all that. But it's also got a micro-chip in it so for people who maybe spend a little bit of time in Europe, you may be familiar with the European bank cards that have the chip and PIN system.
So, it's basically an ID card like that with the little chip in it. And what you do is you hook it up to a little USB card reader, you plug it into your computer and just like you would log on to your Bank of America, Citibank, whatever bank you have, kind of online access website. Imagine kind of a citizen's portal where it logs in and says, 'hello Micah, what would you like to do? Would you like to pay your taxes? Would you like to pay your speeding tickets? Would you like to receive parental benefits for your new children that were just born? Would you like to pay your student loans? Or you don't have student loans because you live in Estonia. You know, would you like -- kind of almost any government service that you can think of you can do through this online citizen's portal.
And one thing you can do is vote. And you can do this of course just so long as you have an internet connection and physical access to your ID card because that's kind of how you're authenticating as you. And basically they're using a well-known in the cryptography community, they're using what's called the Public Key / Private Key scenario and this is used in many other types of cryptography for security -- email and other types of things.
So, this is well understood. They weren't kind of creating anything out of scratch here. But they said, 'okay, we're going to have this system and people can use it to do all kinds of services.' One of the most interesting ones is vote and so they held their first internet-based Presidential election, national election in 2007. And I find this really interesting you know because in the U. S., as we all know, there's various voting standards in different states and I think that it's funny that in the U. S. we can barely get paper voting right and in Estonia they've just moved on to internet voting.
MICAH SIFRY: But the question I have about Estonia and I'm going to also open up the call soon so folks listening if you're hankering to jump in, you can hit *6 and get yourself into the Q&A queue.
But questions I have about Estonia is it sounds great on paper or in the ether, if you will --
CYRUS FARIVAR: On the screen.
MICAH SIFRY: -- on the screen, but are people really using it? I mean -- a couple -- two, three years ago I was invited to a conference on the internet and politics and people I know at the universities -- how in England and there were a bunch of academic papers being presented but one of them was very interesting, it was on Estonia. And Estonia happens to be -- you know, it's hard for us if you don't speak Estonian to access the real you know, sort of life blood of democracy there. I mean it sounds like they've done some amazing things to take advantage of inherent capabilities in technology.
But this paper -- one of the things that it pointed out was that the -- this option for citizens to engage with the legislature and even if enough people signed on in support of a proposed bill that that would force the legislature to at least consider it -- that the actual design interface was not very good and that there was very little training of the bureaucrats inside the legislature whose job it was to deal with citizen comments and so that while the surface looks shiny and beautiful, that the actual practice there -- there is a lot lacking, that is hadn't really led to a flowering of the different kind of civic life.
And I know it may be hard to get at that as an outsider reporting on a place like this, though you obviously spent a lot of time there and you really do profile many of the key people. But can you g et at that? And I don't mean the workings of government, is that different? I mean obviously they've streamlined some bureaucracy it sounds like.
But in terms of how the average person feels about whether they have a more open and two-way dialogue with their elected officials or government public servants, can you give us any sense of how it might be different or how it might be better than what we take for granted with modern government bureaucracies?
CYRUS FARIVAR: Sure, well I think that yeah, just because you can vote on the internet doesn't mean that everybody does. I mean, I was just trying to pull up the results from the most recent election in Estonia and this is from -- I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry that is citing the official Estonian electoral results, but they're indicating that less than 10 percent of Estonians took advantage of being able to vote on the internet.
So, just because you can doesn't mean that you do or that you have to. There's no law that says you have to do it this way. I think that what's interesting about Estonia is that it's a good example of -- you know, oftentimes in the technology world we talk about leapk-frogging technologies.
And Estonia is a country that really was devastated by the Soviet Union during its half-century o f occupation and that's true I think in many cases and I think when Estonia, as I like to say "rebooted" itself in 1991, 20 years ago when it became independent from the Soviet Union, then I think things like mobile phones were able to take root much more quickly because very, very few people -- relatively few people had landlines. So, these kinds of things could come about.
But I think that for some of these things, people don't -- I don't know that it changes how people feel about their civic participation; I don't know that again just because you have internet voting doesn't mean that you will vote online or that you will vote at all, or that you will vote any more --
MICAH SIFRY: And exactly, but the internet voting is only one or voting is only one way that we can express our role as citizens as maybe the most visible and symbolically-- obviously it's quite important, too. But I mean like you were describing the citizen portals, right, that you have the opportunity to log on and access if you will your own file of information that relates to how -- whether it's the taxes you paid or the government services that may be available to you. Do a lot of people use that? Is that -- has that become a kind of salient if you will, a new kind of public meeting space for people?
I mean, that's the sort of thing that policymakers here or elsewhere might want to study because at the moment there is no easy single point of contact for the average citizen who might want that kind of thing. Here you have to go to various different government websites. You certainly can't aggregate all your citizen information in on place the way you could aggregate all your banking information in one place.
(Overlapping remarks) technical obstacle to it. So, has it changed for people there?
CYRUS FARIVAR: I think that one of the big things that we need to think about with respect to how technology is used an not only in writing this book but also living here in Germany, I think that we often need to remember what the cultural norms and values are of that particular place.
So, I talked about this digital ID card system and everybody having access to is and this kind of thing and while I and you and maybe a lot of people on this call might think that, 'yeah, we should have that, why wouldn't we have that?' I would bet that if a member of Congress tomorrow proposed some kind of digital ID card system like that in the U.S., I would imagine a lot of people would be very concerned about giving the government too much access to too many things at one time.
And that people would be a little bit wary -- I mean, again we barely trust -- in my home state of California, California as you may know certified and then de-certified computer based -- not even internet -- but computer based voting, touch-screen voting because people said, 'well, it can't be trusted, we've got to have paper printouts and all this kind of stuff.'
And there's this kind of cultural idea that somehow this isn't trustworthy and so I think it would be a much harder sell in the United States. In Germany this kind of manifested itself in a different way. Last summer some people may know Germany got Google Streetview for the first time. And in the U. S., we've had Google Streetview for I think four years now. And you know there were no politicians that said anything as far as I heard when Google Streetview came out. You didn't have major government officials talking about how this was a big invasion of privacy and how Google needs to respect people's rights more and all this kind of stuff.
But in Germany, that's exactly what happened. You had Cabinet level ministers, the Chancellor herself (inaudible) Merkle talking about this. This was front page news for weeks. And I find that really interesting that this was a big story here because of people's cultural norms and what was expected as private and not versus in the United States where we just kind of shrugged our shoulders and said 'okay, we've got this new thing.'
MICAH SIFRY: Right, and maybe one of the people we have on the call later this year after his book comes out this year is Jeff Jarvis, whose new book is actually-- Public Parts is all about these cultural differences, the cultural attitudes about privacy and sharing.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to talk about Iran and I'm just going to pause for a second because to see if there's anybody who wants to jump in with a question. The way to do that folks is to hit *6 on your phone and then I can unmute and put you right into the conversation here.
But while we're waiting to see if anyone does that, talk to us about Iran and in particular -- I mean, the section on Iran in the book I would say in many ways -- I mean, there's this amazing portrait of a blogger -- early Iranian blogger who you got to know very well obviously who describes his experience of actually being tortured for being a blogger.
I see a question in the queue here so I'm actually going to open it up to that since it's very important to include other voices on this call. But let's make sure we talk about Iran.
Who's calling?
MICHAEL NELSON: This is Michael Nelson, I'm a Professor at Georgetown University and also with the Leading Edge Forum and actually my question was exactly what you were asking, Micah. I bought the book, I have not had a chance to read the whole thing but I bought it because of the section on Iran and I was just -- had a particular question there which was how important has the academic community been in getting the internet into some of these countries?
Here in the U.S., the academic community was kind of the leader in the 80s getting the U. S. connected and a few other countries around the world, including Korea, you can point to universities that really jumped on early. Do we see that pattern in Estonia, Senegal and in particular in Iran? Has there been a role as to the nonprofit sector, particularly the academic sector in pushing the internet forward?
CYRUS FARIVAR: Yeah, what's really interesting -- thanks for the question. I really appreciate your interest in this topic and in the book. But yes, with respect to -- one of the things that I talk about -- I mean kind of basically the general I would say point of the book is kind of how did we get to having Iran being the first country in the world to arrest a blogger? How did we get to Estonia having digital ID cards and digital voting and all this kind of stuff? And how did we get to South Korea being the world's (inaudible) broadband country and so forth? How did this happen?
And so, yeah, so I talk a little bit about the development of the internet in the countries, in particular. And yes, with respect to Iran, there was a professor of -- he works at the Institute of Physics and Mathematics in Tehran and he was a -- kind of like a fellow exchange student while he was a graduate student in Italy -- in I believe it was -- I'd have to double check my notes, but I believe it was in the 1980s and he was first exposed to email, you know, just basic email. And he thought this would be great for our academics to be able to get plugged in with the international academic network and share papers and all the rest.
And so he really pushed for Iran to be connected to the -- to something I believe was called (sounds like: earn net) and then eventually on to the (sounds like: arc net). And it's really interesting actually what's kind of funny and this was one of my favorite I guess you could say coincidences of history -- is that in 1989 when the internet was first approved for use in Iran, it was actually approved by one of the most Islamic conservative families in Iran. I just sent -- for people who are following on Twitter, I just sent out the link to this -- it was approved by a guy called Mohammed (inaudible) Larry Johnny who at the time was the director of this think I mentioned called the Institute for Studies for Theoretical Physics and Mathematics.
And actually his brother is the current speaker of the Iranian Parliament and was the former Iranian Chief Nuclear negotiator and another brother is the head of the very conservative Iranian Judiciary. And so I find it kind of interesting that all of these problems that the Iranian government is having now and many conservatives are trying to shut stuff down, you can trace it back to these same guys going back more than 20 years.
MICAH SIFRY: And Mike has a good question because it is about how the technology spread and what I was hoping what we would get into with Iran is Iran goes through periods where United States and Europe where a number of the early blog evangelists -- something like people like Dave Weiner, Jeff Jarvis again -- were really excited at the potential of the development of the Iranian blogospohere, and people embraced and support bloggers like (sounds like: Hunter), who is in your book and the spread of blogging into Persian was told going to be a factor in the democratization of Iranian culture.
And obviously it's a much more complicated picture. There are all kinds of blogs in Iran including blogs written by the conservative mullahs and their supporters written by people who are into Persian poetry and culture and have no political slant at all.
So, were the early enthusiasts mistaken? Again, this is sort of the like a question when we first started our conversation with about the role of ubiquitous internet in Korea. You know, how would you judge the impact of the spread of networks and connectivity and bottom up self expression in a placed like Iran? Where do you come down on this debate, which won't get resolved in the next 10 minutes, but it's the debate over whether the internet is a democratizing technology or it's just a tool and in fact, the authoritarians can use it as well or better to keep control of their societies?
CYRUS FARIVAR: Yeah, this is a great question and there's a lot to that. I mean I think kind of the way I like to think about it is I don't know if there are any X Files fans out there but I kind of feel like I'm in the position of Fox Molder from the X Files and so for X Files fans you may remember that Fox Molder has a very famous poster in his office and it says, "I want to believe." He wants to believe in UFOs but he doesn't quite totally.
I kind of feel the same way with respect to democratization in the internet. I want to believe that's true, I want to believe that the internet can bring about more democracy in a place like Iran or anywhere else in the world. But as of now, I don't. And actually it's interesting because the original title of my book was going to be called Planet Internet: The Liberating Effects of a Wired World. That was the initial title.
But as I dug into this and I think as anybody does if you -- as this has gone on and as governments like Iran, governments like China especially have gotten more and more sophisticated about how they use the internet not only for their own propaganda purposes and for their own message and for their own kind of control and filtering and surveillance and all that kind of stuff. And we shouldn't also forget that countries (SILENCE) governments retain in some cases, you know, the power of the judiciary and the power of violence at their disposal as we saw in the case of Iran.
You have people who can be imprisoned or even killed for what they say online or even put into exile. And so I think we shouldn't forget that yes, people like who I profile in the book, people like Ohmed who live outside of Iran and can write whatever they want online from the freedom of his apartment in San Francisco. You know, the fact of the matter is is that he's basically been exiled from the country and doesn't really have a future in the country anymore.
And so you have to ask yourself I think as those people get marginalized, do they become less relevant as a generation ago, a people of my father's generation, many of whom emigrated to Europe and to North America, as they become marginalized, you know, who started satellite TV stations in Los Angeles and things like that.
I don't know the answer, it's a really tough question. As of now I would lean toward the fact that the internet has the potential to be a democratizing force but it also has the potential to be a tool for surveillance and for oppression as well.
MICAH SIFRY So, the blog is not necessarily mightier than the sword. But let's look at where things are now in terms of Iran or for that matter, Syria. I mean, the outsiders are playing somewhat of a catalytic role in that I mean, some of the state control has been eroded, you know, YouTube videos continue to get out of Syria now, satellite phones got in and there's -- I mean obviously it's not technology alone that's keeping this movement alive, but people have -- if it's a cat and mouse game between the police and the dissidents you know to some degree you know, I think we still don't know who's going to win.
And I mean I'm with you in that -- and I love that Fox Molder image in wanting to believe but remaining skeptical. I mean -- I assume you're watching -- since finishing the book , you're watching developments in all these places with a great deal of interest. So what is your take?
CYRUS FARIVAR: (audio out)
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