Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

The protests in Singapore had little to do with curry and everything to do with the growing concerns about foreigners (particularly mainland Chinese) coming in and taking jobs. Unsurprisingly, opposition groups keen to push this agenda found Currygate an easy episode to exploit. For a country like Singapore, which prides itself on stability, efficiency and the rule of law, the broadcasting of such anger from so many citizens revealed a vulnerability in its system: Even in as tightly controlled a space as Singapore, government restrictions and social codes have limited leverage in the online world. For Lee, the episode foreshadowed a tide of online expression that the Singaporean leadership acknowledges will be impossible to roll back. If even the authorities in Singapore are feeling the heat of a newly connected civil society, imagine how nervous more fragile governments in other parts of the world must feel.

We asked Lee how he thought China would handle this transition, given that, in a decade, almost a billion Chinese citizens will become connected in a heavily censored society. “What happens in China is beyond anyone’s full control, even the Chinese government,” he said. “China will have a difficult time accommodating all of these new voices, and the transition from a minority of the population online to the majority is going to be difficult for the leaders.” Concerning the subject of leadership, he added, “Successive generations of Chinese leaders will not have the charisma or communications skills to generate momentum among the population. In this sense, the virtual world will become far cooler and far more relevant to the Chinese people than the physical world.” Change, he said, would not just come from people outside the system: “It is people inside the system, the cadres of the Chinese establishment, who are influenced by the [street] chatter and who also have skeptical views of the legitimacy of the government.”

We agree with Lee and other regional experts that China’s future will not necessarily be bright. Some interpret projections of declining economic growth, an aging population and technology-driven change as indications that the Chinese state will soon be fighting for survival in its current form, while others suggest instead that these impending challenges will ultimately spur even more innovation and problem-solving from China. But ultimately it is difficult for us to imagine how a closed system with 1.3 billion people, huge socioeconomic challenges, internal ethnic issues and robust censorship will survive the transition to the new digital age in its current form. With greater connectivity will come greater expectations, demands and accountability that even the world’s largest surveillance state will not be able to control fully. In instances where law enforcement goes too far or cronies of the regime engage in reckless behavior that causes physical harm to Chinese citizens, we will see more public movements demanding accountability. Because ministers loathe embarrassment, pressure from weibo s and other online forums can result in more pressure and change, eventually curbing the excesses of one-party rule.

So while the Internet may not democratize China overnight, increased public accountability will put at least some pressure on the regime to act on the public’s demands for justice. And if economic growth should noticeably slow down, it could create a revolutionary opening for some elements of the population. China will experience some kind of revolution in the coming decades, but how widespread and effective it is will come down to the willingness of the population to take risks both online and in the streets.

Future revolutions, wherever they happen and whatever form they take, may change regimes, but they will not necessarily produce democratic outcomes. As Henry Kissinger told us, “The history of revolutions is a confluence of resentment that reaches an explosive point and it then sweeps away the existing structure. After that, there is either chaos or a restoration of authority which varies in inverse proportion to the destruction of previous authority.” In other words, following a successful revolution, “the more authority is destroyed, the more absolute the authority that follows is,” Kissinger said. Having experienced successful and failed revolutions over more than forty years, he has deep knowledge of their designs and character. The United States and Eastern Europe are the only cases, according to him, in which the destruction of the existing structure led to the creation of a genuine democracy. “In Eastern Europe,” he explained, “the revolutions succeeded because the experience of dictatorship was so bad, and there was a record of being Western and part of the democratic tradition, even if they were never democracies.”

While Kissinger’s point about the distinctness of Eastern Europe is well taken, we cannot dismiss the role that incentives play in the success of revolutions. We would be remiss to leave out the incredibly important incentive of being able to join the European Union (E.U.). If E.U. membership had not been available as a political motive for liberal elites and populations as a whole and also as a stabilizing factor, we would likely have seen much more backsliding and counterrevolution in a number of different countries. This is why the Western powers had to expand NATO and offer E.U. membership.

The absence of this democratic culture is part of the reason the overthrow of dictatorships during the Arab Spring produced, in the eyes of some, merely watered-down versions of autocracies instead of pure Jeffersonian democracies. “Instead of having all power consolidated under one dictator,” Kissinger said, “they split themselves into various parties—secular and non-secular—but ultimately find themselves dominated by one Muslim party running a token coalition government.” The result will be coalition governments, which “ The New York Times will welcome as an expression of great democracy,” he joked, but really, “at the end of that process stands a government without opposition, even if it comes into being in a one-off election.”

Autocratic-leaning coalition governments, Kissinger predicts, will often be the form new governments produced by digital revolutions assume in the coming decades, less because of technology than because of the lack of strong, singular leaders. Without a dominant leader and vision, power-sharing governments emerge as the most viable option to pacify most participants, yet they’ll always run the risk of not distancing themselves sufficiently from the previous regime or the older generation of political actors.

Revolutions are but one manifestation of discontent. They stick out in our memories because they can often adopt romantic overtones, and be easily woven into human narratives about freedom, liberty and self-determination. With more technology come more anecdotes that capture our imagination and make nice headlines. Even when unsuccessful, revolutionaries occupy a particular position in our collective history that confers a certain respect, if begrudgingly so. These are highly important components in human political development, central to our understanding of citizenship and social contracts, and the next generation of technologies will not change this.

But while revolutions are how some pursue change within the system or express their discontent with the status quo, there will always be people and groups who pursue the same objectives through the most devastating and violent means. Terrorists and violent extremists will be as much a part of our future as they are our present. The next chapter will delve into the radicalization hotbeds of our future—both in the physical world and online—and explain how an extended battlefield will change the nature of terrorism and what tools we have to fight it.