 Hi everybody, I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president of New America, and I'm going to be interviewing Emily Parker, the digital diplomacy advisor to New America, former New America fellow, and I have to add, my former colleague at policy planning in the State Department. So Emily and I have worked together for some time. So you didn't realize that Tuesday afternoon at four is the new happy hour if you have not helped yourself on this snowy day to liquid libation, please go ahead and welcome to all of those of you online, you'll have to get your own liquid libation, but we're going to talk for about a half an hour and then open it up to questions. And this is a wonderful new book. Now I know who my comrades are, Voices from the Internet Underground. So first of all, Emily, I have to ask you about the title, now I know who my comrades are. Tell us about why that's the title of the book and the significance in the case of the book. Sure. So thank you all for coming and thank you, Anne-Marie, for bringing my pleasure. So this book actually took root in 2004 when I was working at the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. We were starting a series of columns about China and the Internet. It was called Virtual Possibilities China and the Internet. And as I was thinking about this column, I was trying to understand why does the Internet matter in China? Because, well first of all, back then it seemed like a niche sort of small story compared to now. It's hard to believe, but it wasn't clear that the Internet was going to be a game changer in China. The other thing was that it was clear that even as Chinese netizens were finding ways to get around barriers to information and were finding ways to break through censorship, it was clear that the government was really giving them a run for their money. So every time some small piece of information appeared online that was contrary to what the state wanted, it would disappear quite quickly. So this raised the obvious question, which is why does the Internet matter in China? What I came to realize is that the Internet matters in China not as a mechanism for promoting freedom of speech or freedom of information, but because it can advance freedom of assembly. And China is a government that has zero tolerance for any physical gathering of a group that it distrusts. So given that reality, it's no small event that you can have hundreds, thousands, millions of like-minded individuals gathering every day. So the title of this book comes from a conversation that I had with an Internet dissident in Beijing and I asked him point-blank, why does the Internet matter in China? And he said, because now I know who my comrades are. The idea was that before the Internet, I thought I was alone. I thought I was the only one who had questions about the system or questions about the government, but now I know who my comrades are. Now I know that there are other people like me. So I want to ask you a bigger question about that, but this particular dissident is Michael Antie, right? Is his name Antie? That's a pseudonym, I assume. He's Chinese. Yeah, so his name is Xiaojing, but yeah, he uses Antie, which comes from Lord Antie, you know, to a post. Right, OK, I see. I just finally made that connection. So this idea of now I know who my comrades are. There's a, when I was dean at the Woodrow Wilson School, one of our faculty members, a psychologist, did some fascinating work on public opinion where he showed that people who hold a particular view are likely to believe that they are in the minority, even when they're in the majority. So you're opposed to the government or you think that a particular policy is a bad idea. You will believe that if you're asked, you'll say, well, only 20% people believe that, even when in fact 50 or 60% might be that. So it's a very, and when you tell people that, of course, they are empowered. So this idea that, you know, now I know who my comrades are. I'm not alone. I have support, hugely important. But the government knows who his comrades are, too. So how did, one essential question here is, yes, this empowers the opposition, but it empowered, doesn't it empower the government even more? Something the United States knows quite a bit about. Sure. So you mean empowering the government by knowing who the citizens are? Yes. In other words, they now can see the electronic traces of a virtual assembly in the same way they can see it if everybody comes to the square, although in some ways even more, because if you gather in a square and you run away, they can't prove you were there, but on the internet, they can't. Yeah. So that's absolutely true. And I don't want to downplay the efforts of authoritarian governments to crack down on online dissent, right? I mean, this book is filled with surveillance and censorship and arrests and intimidation. It's not like I'm saying those things don't exist or that they're not formidable obstacles. But the thing to remember about the power of virtual assembly is that it's much easier for a government to crack down on a few isolated individuals, right? And so this is, in part, it is the power of numbers, right? So this book, in the Russia section of this book, I talk about attending a protest in Russia. And protest in Russia, and my friend here was, who was that, that protest with me? Protest here, protest in Russia tend to be, you know, before very recently, it was, you know, a couple dozen activists would come out and they'd protest and the police would descend upon them with a vengeance and, you know, kind of drag them away into buses. And it was completely pointless and it was completely dangerous. And so if you're a Russian opposition activist, you're going to think to yourself, what is the point of going out, right? Not only will it not accomplish anything, but I'm going to get arrested, right? Now, you look at the Russian protests that happened around 2011, 2012, and these were the largest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union. And social media played an important role, not just in organizing them, but in showing the Russian opposition that they were not alone, right? So they would go on Facebook and they'd see that 10,000 people were registered for some sort of protest. And that's going to, the power of numbers is going to be a powerful weapon against governments that are trying to crack down on individuals. Something else I remember you told me, I think this was back when I was in the state, and when we were both in the State Department, that it also means that it has a life beyond the arrests. In other words, that we tend to look at it as a protest and the government shut it down and that's that. But that it keeps on going below the surface and kind of erupts protests by protest. So I mean, so if you look at Russia now, I would say independent of Ukraine, we were looking at, you know, there were the Pussy Riot protests, there's Alex Navalny whom you write about and you can tell us about, but I would have said right now it looks like the government has the upper hand. Is that the way you see it as well, or is that just a temporary lull? So authoritarian governments always look all powerful until suddenly they're not, right? And, you know, if you're just kind of watching it, it looks like, oh, well, this government fell in the blink of an eye or these protests in Russia exploded in the blink of an eye. But in reality, it's not quite true. I mean, take Egypt, for example. Egypt's a really good example. You know, this was the Mubarak government had been in power for 30 years, right? And if you had said to somebody, the Internet is going to shake things up in Egypt, you would have been laughed out of the room. It seems completely impossible. But somewhere beneath the surface, you had all these people gathering online. They were joining forces. They were signing online petitions. They were doing online campaigns. And so when that revolutionary moment came, they were ready. And I think Russia is quite similar. You know, I've talked to some of these Russian opposition activists recently, and it's true that Russia is quite dark right now and that it doesn't look like the opposition movement is thriving. However, they're getting ready. You know, and you look at something like Navalny's mayoral campaign, that was a very effective use of online and offline activism. You know, this is Alexei Navalny, who's the most prominent opposition activist and blogger in Russia. And he, you know, he's been completely barred from state media. He's not on the television. He's not in newspapers. And yet he managed to give a pretty good showing in the mayoral election. And that really shows that the Russian online opposition has been really working to kind of organize and be effective. And so they're just kind of waiting. And that they've said as much. You know, they're sort of waiting for the tide to turn. And it could be an external factor. It could be an economic crisis. It could be a political crisis. But they're building up the skills in online organizations so that they're ready to capitalize on that crisis when it occurs. But Navalny himself is shut down, right? For now, yeah. But there's always, you know, so Navalny is shut down. But you know, you explained he's under house arrest. He's under house arrest with this very interesting condition that not only is he under house arrest, he's not allowed to use the internet, which I don't even know if that, I don't think that's in the Russian criminal code. I think that's just something that they gave to him. So like an ankle bracelet that, you know, yeah, he actually has a bracelet. He has a bracelet, and now the bracelet has its own Twitter feed, you know. But there's always, that's the thing, you know. So Navalny is off the internet, but then his wife takes over the Twitter feed. And also, I mean, one of the things that Navalny has effectively done in Russia is that it's not entirely dependent on him. I mean, he has a lot of followers and he has a little bit of an infrastructure for promoting his message and promoting his causes, even if he physically can't be there. So are there, if you look at the internet opposition or activist communities in China and Russia, are there more similarities or dissimilarities? I mean, how culturally contingent is this? They're different more because the way that the governments control the internet is quite different in all three countries. So China by far has the most extensive censorship mechanism. You know, you have the notorious great firewall of China. You have, you know, armies of human censors. Like three million people, right? It depends on who you ask. Yeah, I mean, you know, Chinese censorship is not, you know, like some guy in government wearing a trench coat and taking things off the internet. It's people who work at web companies. It's people at all levels of society. Some of them are quite normal people who are actually, you know, doing the censorship. You have, you know, automatic filter keywords. So China has this very extensive method of censorship and I guess they feel that they need it because by some statistics there's something like, I don't know, 600 million web users in China. So there's like crazy number. You have Cuba, which doesn't have that same level of censorship because there's so few people in Cuba that are online. You know, Cuba you have by some estimates, you know, 5% of people actually using the World Wide Web. They have an internet. You know, official figures are higher, but you have this tiny number of people and the Cubans, Cuban government regulates the internet by making it prohibitively expensive to use it and making it just inaccessible. And then in Russia. But they don't censor. So like if you can get on, you can talk, but nobody can talk to you because they can't get on. There definitely have been stories of, you know, blocked websites and censorship. It's not that it doesn't exist, but it's less important there because it's less part of the story because it's just so hard to get online and so few Cubans get online. And then in Russia, until fairly recently, the Russian authorities didn't really mess with the internet at all. We're seeing that change now. But what I write about in the book is that one of the main things that kept Russians from organizing online was not government action. It was apathy. It was a sense that, you know, there's no point. And the internet simply reflects the reality on the ground. And in Russia, for most of the time when I was writing this book, 85% of Russians said that they felt they had no impact on their political process. So that's, the internet is not gonna change that. So there was a sense that you could find anything on the internet and you could write anything on the internet, but what would be the point? So the three cultures are very different because the three atmospheres are very different. So I wanna ask you a little more about Cuba and then I'll come back to all three. How did you, first place, how did you research this in Cuba if you can talk about that? With difficulty? Is there any Cuban official here now? No. With difficulty. So Cuba was by far the most difficult. It's funny because I think China and Russia probably have more sophisticated surveillance, but in Cuba, the surveillance is more in your face. So, you know, in Cuba, for example, you'd be sitting at a cafe and you would have the sense that like, the guy at the next table is watching you and that was something you heard over and over in Cuba which is, you never know who is who. You know, an informer could be at the next table and an informer could be in a store and an informer could be in a cafe. People are always asking you questions, you never really know why. So, you know, when I went to Cuba, I kept a really low profile. The lowest possible profile. I didn't write anything about Cuba, you know, during the years that I was researching the book. I didn't even tweet about Cuba. I just tried to stay as below the radar as possible. But you were able to go. I went several times, yeah. And so, I guess then if you're in Cuba and you know only 5% of people are online, what's the point? Yeah, so Cuba, it's funny because that is a very natural question to ask and yet in researching this book, I found that the internet probably had the most transformative effect on the citizens that I met in Cuba who were using it. So, there's basically two things at play here. First, it's true. They're not really using the internet to communicate with other Cubans, but they are using it to communicate to the outside world, right? And that's a big deal because this is a country in which the official media really decides how the story of Cuba is told. You know, this is a nation with great healthcare and great education and a lot of happy campers and high literacy rates, you know? So, for Cuban bloggers, this was their one opportunity to tell Cuba as they saw it and as they felt it. You know, it was also very important for kind of reconnecting the Cuban exile community with the Cubans inside of Cuba. This is kind of a, this is the population that had been really split apart by politics. But most important, I think the internet in Cuba was psychologically transformative because Cuba is the most paranoid society I've personally ever been in. And you know, it's a place where it's ruled by citizen informers. You have to be constantly careful about what you say, who you say it to, how you say it. And I was personally affected by this. You know, it's very debilitating, constantly being worried about how you present yourself. And so, you have these people who never really spoke with their own voice, right? They never really spoke honestly. And then they go online and they start their blog and they're kind of, for once they kind of find their voice and they find themselves and it's really empowering to them. And so, I felt when I was in Cuba there was this real difference. There were kind of the bloggers and then there was everybody else, you know? And the bloggers were, you know, walking through the streets and they're like, okay, is this guy taking a picture of me? I don't care. Is this person trying to secretly follow me? I don't care because I, you know, is one Cuban said to me, I comport myself like a free man. You know, he comported himself completely differently. And this changes the way they behave because fear, in many ways, is the most potent weapon of the Cuban regime, right? It's what keeps the Cubans in control because it's people, it's not, Cuba's not a police state in the sense, not in the way Russia is where you see these riot police everywhere and you're terrified to confront them. In Cuba, fear rules, right? So there's people who just don't, they're scared of their neighbors, they're scared of speaking out, they're scared of banding together and the bloggers that I met had overcome that fear. Because they were speaking and they'd found their voice. Yeah, and it has offline repercussions. You know, for example, I write about one blogger who gets arrested and all these other bloggers rally to her defense. You know, they swarm the state security building and then they all get arrested too. But it totally changes the way they behave. And so my impression of Cuba was, if these individuals reached a critical mass, Cuba would be a radically different place. And I think the government is aware of that and I think that's why they keep internet penetration as low as it is. You know, it does raise just fascinating questions about speech and dignity. And you know, if I put on my law professor hat, sort of the theories of the First Amendment, but it is the First Amendment. It's the first one, right? That Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech, that ability to speak in an authentic voice as affirming your own identity as a human being separate from others is just such a fundamental psychological thing. I mean, it's interesting as you talk about China, I am one and I have comrades. When you talk about Cuba, it's more I have found myself. There are others like me, but that's very interesting. Yeah, I mean, I'm mostly interested in this psychological element. So I spent about 10 years on the ground in these three countries. I spent a lot of time with these people and it really is changing the psychology of citizens in these countries, the internet is. And one of the framework of this book, I talk about how most authoritarian regimes would not survive a sustained mass uprising, right? It's not all about this military power and all these, they wouldn't survive it. And in many cases, these sustained mass uprisings don't come to pass largely because of psychological elements, right? And the three that I identify in this book are isolation, fear, and apathy, right? Isolation, fear, and apathy keep authoritarian regimes in power, right? I mean, it's very simple. Isolation, authoritarian regimes try to isolate critics from one another. So if I go outside and scream at the top of my lungs, whatever I want about the government, it's not gonna do anything. But if a thousand people do that, it's a threat, right? And so authoritarian governments understand this very well. Second one is fear, as we saw in Cuba, that fear, if citizens are too scared to speak out, if they're too scared to join forces with their neighbors, if they're too scared to take action, they never will. And the third one is apathy, which I think was most relevant in Russia. And apathy in many ways is an authoritarian government's best defense, right? Apathy is kind of what happens, what once fear and isolation have done their damage. It's this feeling that, you know, what's the point? It's not gonna change anything anyway. And that's something that we saw a lot of in Russia over the past few years. This feeling that, yeah, I could go outside in protest, but like, I'm just gonna get arrested and it's not gonna change anything. It's not gonna give us a new leader. It's not gonna give us democratic elections. So I'm just gonna stay home, you know? And so what I've observed in these three countries is that the internet in various ways is helping people transcend these psychological obstacles. So in China, people are overcoming their isolation by finding their comrades online. In Cuba, people are overcoming their fear by speaking the truth and kind of, you know, having the support of the international community. Yeah. And in Russia, people are overcoming apathy simply because success is the best antidote to apathy. And so this is where Navalny was so successful. He started out, and there's a great line from him a few years ago when I first met him and he said, I propose to people the comfortable way of struggle, right? He understood very, very well that Russians were not about to get on the street and do a mass demonstration. That they just were not interested in doing that. But what he might be able to get them to do is fill out an online form, right? So he would give them a template. He'd say, okay, here's a form. We're protesting corruption at this bank. And all you need to do is sign your name and we'll send it off to the Ministry of the Interior. It took people two seconds. They could do it from their living room. And then they started getting results. You know, suddenly officials were getting fired, bad deals were getting reversed. And I think once Russians saw that they could make a difference, they became more motivated to act. So it's funny, because we talk about slactivism here. You know, like it tends to be a derisive term. It's like, oh, you know, this is just internet activism. It's not real life activism. But what Navalny did was he showed people that internet activism could make a difference. And once they realized that, they were just more likely to be active, period. You know, online and offline. So that's my last question actually. It's exactly the online offline connection. So I remember in Tina Rosenberg's book, Join the Club, she talks about the impact that the group that responsible for the Serbian Revolution had in working with groups of revolutionaries in Egypt, in Tunisia, in other countries. And essentially her argument was, you know, you can have 70,000 people as part of a Facebook group, as you did with, we are all well-lead. Yeah, Khaled Said in Egypt. But that does not, 70,000 people on Facebook does not readily translate into a sustained demonstration on the ground. That you need a whole nother set of teaching you how to organize, teaching you how to make it cool to organize, to come out. So I wanted to ask you, what's the link there? Where, you know, the internet activism overcomes fear and apathy and isolation. But do you need something more to translate that into the kind of crowds and sustained demonstrations that actually make a revolution? Yeah, that's a great question. So yes, you do need something more. And the argument that I make is the internet just reflects the reality on the ground. So if that society is ready for offline protests, if it's ready for revolution, then the internet will play that role. If it's not, the internet is not gonna create it. So I would never argue that the internet on its own causes revolution. I think that's a crazy argument. I don't know that many serious people who are arguing that. It's a convenient straw man for anyone who wants to take down. Yeah, it's a straw man. And you know, Egypt, so you look at Egypt, right? So Egypt, for years, you had all these people gathering online, doing these kind of online campaigns and building up online skills. But the conventional wisdom on Egypt, and actually there was an article three months before the Egyptian Revolution with the title, Egypt's online descent has yet to move to the streets or something like that. That was the conventional wisdom. It's like, this is all virtual. Forget it, it's all virtual. And we saw that wasn't true. However, in Egypt's case, there needs to be a spark, right? It's what Lennon called a revolutionary situation. There needs to be a revolutionary situation for a revolution to happen. In Egypt's case, I think that spark was Tunisia. I mean, there were obviously a lot of things happening, but Tunisia was this neighboring country that also had an authoritarian government that also looked like it would last forever. All of a sudden was gone. And I think Egyptians saw that and they thought, well, maybe we have a shot. And so suddenly this kind of online energy became translated into offline. And Russia's another good example. I mean, for Russia, for years, there were kind of interesting things happening on the internet, but it seemed only virtual. And then all of a sudden, there were 100,000 people in the streets. In that case, they were riled up by election fraud. They said, we've had enough. There's always something. There's always something that pushes people there. But in the years that people spend online, kind of finding their comrades, overcoming these psychological barriers, it means that when the revolutionary situation comes, they're ready for it. So that is a great note on which to turn to the audience. Is there a microphone? Yes. So Leonie, we'll bring you the microphone and we'll just raise your hand to Kirsten, brother. Sorry, Kirsten. Oh, sorry. Hi there. First of all, thanks so much for being here today. My name's Adam Fivinson. I'm a graduating second year at the MS and Foreign Service Program at Georgetown. Just wanted to ask you a kind of a policy-related question. So for those of us who are going into the policy, development, diplomatic world, whatever it might be, what are the recommendations that you have, assuming our goal is to support the growth of an internet that does support freedom, open speech, and democracy in other countries around the world. What recommendations do you have? Yes. No, no. So, both of us have worked specifically in this area. I think the first thing for the US obviously is to keep its own house in order, right? It's pretty hard for the US to go around the world talking about internet freedom when other countries are saying, well, you guys are not really doing a good job of that. So I think that's number one. I think that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did a good thing in kind of putting internet freedom on the agenda. I think that's important. She said this is a foreign policy priority. The good thing about that is it also turns a lot of eyes on the US because once you say, once you come out there and you say, I wanna promote internet freedom abroad, of course everyone is gonna kind of say, well, what about this and what about that? You're not doing this, you're not doing that. I think that's a good thing, right? I mean, I think that's really what the US can do first and foremost. There's, I think like State Department funding for kind of online dissidents, you don't have to be careful with that. I think sometimes it's more effective than other times. I mean, I think what a lot of these governments try to do is paint anybody who's an online dissident as kind of a mercenary of the CIA. So I think you have to be careful with the US government and who you support because it could actually make those people less effective. I also think that there's a big role to be played by our corporations, by Twitter, Facebook, Google. I mean, some of these places are like the best brand ambassadors for the US. And there's things that these companies can do to make their technologies more accessible in countries like China. Great, yes, here in the front. Hi, my name is Ananda Leek. I'm the founder of Digital Sisterhood Network. And I'm really interested to know while you were in Cuba, did you have a chance to talk to Yoni Sanchez? And can you tell us a little bit about your experience with her? Sure, so yes, they did meet Yoni Sanchez. And actually one of the main figures in my book is not Yoni, but her husband, Ronaldo. Yoni, I didn't focus on as much only because Yoni at this point is not your typical Cuban blogger. She's practically like a diplomat at this point. So Yoni, for those of you who don't know, no, Yoni is by far Cuba's most famous blogger. And she's a real example of what the internet can do for an individual. I mean, she's someone who started blogging under her own name and kind of writing about the things she saw in Cuba. In Spanish, I assume. In Spanish, but now her blog is translated into many different languages. And she actually, even at one point, she wrote questions to President Obama and he answered. I mean, that's kind of the weight that she has. And she is almost like, I don't know, a digital diplomat or even a non-digital diplomat in the sense that she, recently, Cuba made it easier for Cubans to travel outside of Cuba. So Yoni did this kind of world tour and she went to Miami and she was kind of arguing about lifting the embargo. So it's kind of amazing. I mean, this is just this ordinary person who is a total critic of the Cuban government who via the internet has been transformed into actually someone who might be able to change policy. Wow. And then her husband. So her husband is amazing. I mean, he's less famous than Yoni, but he's fast and he's actually the one who said I comport myself like a free man. He's a really, he's much older than her and he used to work for the Cuban state media, which is kind of interesting. He used to be a Cuban official journalist and then he slowly kind of moved from the official media to foreign media to blogging and now he's kind of writes with his own voice and he's an amazing person. He's really interesting. He's kind of walks through the streets of Havana with no fear at all and he's quite inspiring actually. Oh, no. Great, thank you. Other questions? Yes, David. Thanks. David Sturman, a research assistant here. My question regards in countries like Cuba where there's a economic, either an underlying economic reason why people don't have access to the internet or government imposed false economic reason for why there's a digital divide. Do you see internet advocacy producing groups that are more tied to outside the country and are therefore either in actuality not really representative democratic movements or even if they're not, even if they're not are more easily portrayed that way by the government to their detriment. That's a good question. So I think the government will definitely portray people like that that way. But in Cuba, for example, the people that I profile in my book, interestingly enough, are not even really dissidents. They're Cubans who were just fed up with the system. They felt that they weren't making enough money to live and they found a way to express themselves. So, for example, one of the Cubans I profile in my book is a judge, she was a judge. She worked for the Cuban judicial system and she found herself kind of having to deliver these verdicts that she thought were completely unfair. She had to go to the family and say, your relative is convicted of stealing a bottle of oil because he was starving. I mean, she found that completely unfair and so she wanted to find a place to vent her frustration and so she started writing her blog and then in doing that, she was labeled a dissident and she became a dissident. So actually, most of the Cubans I've met in Ioanni might be a little bit different. Ioanni is more of your classic dissident blogger. Some of them are just normal people who had had enough and then they become dissidents almost by default. I'm Susan Morgan. I run the Global Network Initiative. I had a question about your book and I'm making an assumption here which might be incorrect. I'm presuming you just focus on China, Cuba and Russia. That's true. And I was just wondering why you chose those three countries and just as a little aside, when I was in Cuba a few years ago, one of the things that really struck me in the streets was in the residential streets, there was almost always a little sign that said committee for the defense of the revolution. So it was just a little visible thing that said someone somewhere is watching. Yeah, so the CDRs and that's basically what those are citizens, our networks of citizen informers that were put in place by Fidel Castro himself. It's the idea that like somebody on every block is like keeping files on residents and that's still in place. I mean, there are still signs for that and can you imagine living under something like that where you know that there are people, you don't know who they are, you don't know who is who, you don't know who's informing to them, but yeah, that's a very effective mechanism of control in Cuba. Why did I pick these three countries? So China was obvious because I kind of come from a China background and I was looking for other case studies where you had a government that was trying to control information and assembly and you also had a vibrant online opposition. So actually, originally, Egypt was one of the case studies in this book and what's funny about that is literally in 2009, 2010, if you went to people, if you went to publishers or think tanks or whatever and you said Egypt's gonna be a game, the internet could be a game changer in Egypt, you were like laughed out of the room. Seriously, people thought that was absolutely insane. And I wasn't even saying there's gonna be a revolution. I was just saying the internet's gonna do something in Egypt and people thought that was ridiculous. They said, here's Mubarak, he's all powerful and the internet is only virtual. So Russia, I got a fellowship to go to Russia and had a chance to live there for a period and so I did Russia instead. I think the easiest answer to your question, it's maybe not the most sophisticated answer is, I really wanted to write about countries where I had access. I wanted to write about countries where I could spend a lot of time there, where I had contacts, where I had some language ability and sometimes people ask me, why isn't Iran in this book, for example? And actually, I would love for Iran to be in this book but it wasn't feasible for me to go and make six trips to Iran hanging out with internet dissidents there. I mean, maybe someone else could have done it. I didn't see it as feasible and I really didn't want one of those books where I'm sitting at my desk in Washington or my desk in New York just kind of like opining about how internet dissidents must feel. I really wanted places where I could go back and live there and kind of experience it. So that was sort of how this came about. It's just kind of figuring out where those places were. Here up here in the front, I have another question too, but I'm gonna. Hi, George Peeler, I'm an attorney and I write for Forbes.com. I wonder if you could draw some analogies between your work as in the book and some things going on in the United States, not just the Snowden revelators that have met people somewhat paranoia about their own communications but actual use of the techniques you're describing and affecting policy. Are you stopping SOPA to stop online privacy act a few years ago? The Rand Paul filibuster on drone strikes against Americans, that type of thing. So yeah, it's a good question. The United States, look, the United States is not perfect in this regard, right? I think that in terms of freedom of information in the United States, I would never say that the US has like a perfect record on this and you do see movements in the US that the same kind of things that you see in these countries, you see online collective action, some of the examples you gave, to reverse what people see as restrictive US policy. I guess the one thing I would say about the US is that even though the US does not have a perfect record in this area, at least we are having an active debate about US freedom of expression and I think that's the one thing that sets the US apart from some of the countries in this book and that regardless of what you think about Snowden, at least we're talking about it, at least the media's investigating it, at least there's like a variety of opinions about it and that at this point is not something that could happen in China, Cuba or Russia. I don't know, Emery, I'm sure you have. No, so I think that's right, but I take your question a little differently which is particularly with Pippa and Sofa, I saw that actually as an interest, you could argue that's a case where internet activism overcame a kind of apathy here that many of us would have thought, come on, what are we gonna do? This is Hollywood, so you know, backing, this is an intellectual property, this is really hard, but what you saw, at least I mean, I experienced it almost entirely through Twitter, but was suddenly this thing just taking off and you realize by putting the Pippa or Sofa sign on your avatar, you could join this movement. So I think there's some examples, at least that's one where you could say even in a country where we are free to assemble and we are certainly unrestricted in many ways on the internet, if it's apathy, more than fear, I think, or isolation, it's been important here too, it'd be interesting to carry that out. I was thinking more of those times was actually getting information out into a critical map of the person. Right, and a much wider group. We'll never get out that way. Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. Yes, they're on the side. Right in front of us, the other way. Okay, there you go, and then die in front of you. Hi, Maria Rapnikova, Georgetown University. Thank you so much. Hi, it's been nice to finally meet you, we were in Tash, I don't know, years ago, I guess, in Russia, so I have a couple of quick points. First about the actual process of research, what kind of challenges did you encounter the most, say in Russia, China versus Cuba? You talked about Cuba a little bit, but how do the other countries differ in that regard in terms of access and kind of just open dialogue? How welcoming were people to your questions? And also, what surprised you the most in this process? You spent a long time there, did something surprise you at the beginning or more towards the end? Like, what was the process like? And did you interview any nationalistic bloggers or those who are pro-regime and how do those conversations differ from the dissidents? Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, let me make sure I get all those questions. So the challenges of Russia and China versus Cuba. So yeah, there were challenges in all three, in terms of my own personal safety, I mean, you're always thinking about that, but the difference between writing a book and writing a series of articles is you have the option of being very low profile for a long time. So I was very quiet about this project in order to get it done. I wasn't constantly blogging from these countries or tweeting from these countries, and that helped a lot. I think one of the big challenges in all three countries is building up trust, right? In China in particular, why would we talk to you? Like why is it in their interest to talk to you? And I think some of that just came with time. When you first show up, it's like, oh, here's some other American just coming to talk to us, and why would we? But when you come back year after year after year, they're more inclined to open up to you. And also when they see that you're, it is all about kind of connectivity when they see who else you're talking to and who your friends are, they're more likely to open up to you. So those were challenges, I think, building up trust. And of course, yeah, I mean, in Cuba, in Russia I didn't feel this so much, but in Cuba definitely, I mean, just feeling that surveillance was everywhere and you had to be very careful and you couldn't really operate the way you normally would. Normally you come into a country, you wanna have as many meetings as possible, you're kind of running from one place to another. In Cuba you can't really do that or you're gonna attract too much attention to yourself. And in the book I talk about an academic who was in Cuba right before me also doing research on the Cuban internet who was confronted at the airport and told to leave. He told never to come back. And that was because he just met so many people and he actually, what was interesting is he met people from all across the political divide. He met pro-government Cuban bloggers and anti-government Cuban bloggers and I think that was in a way even more threatening because I think somebody perceived that he was trying to like connect people or something. But yeah, it was just all about keeping a really low profile. Your next question was, oh, being surprised. So I think I was most surprised by Russia of all three countries. So when I came to Russia, I didn't even really have a way, kind of a means of analysis. I was coming from China, the Great Firewolf, China, and netizens writing in code to evade government censors and Russia, that paradigm didn't exist at all. So Russia for the most part had a perfectly free internet which is really interesting and the academic research on Russia at that time, this was a few years ago, was Russia, the web that failed. It was this idea that, okay, so you have all these people that are unhappy with the government and you have this internet where you can get all sorts of information and you can organize however you want and nobody's using it. Highly literate people, too. Yeah, highly literate people. Yeah, and significant internet penetration. I mean, that wasn't the issue and yet nobody was really using the internet for activism. So I found that sort of surprising. But then I also, what I saw in Russia is how just there are different versions kind of a possibility underneath the reality, right? So the first Russia I saw was this like apathetic Russia. You could find everything online, but nobody cared. You know, the second Russia was like late 2011 where all of a sudden there's 100,000 people in the streets and then the third Russia is like Russia now where it's kind of like more, it's gone back to this dark authoritarian feeling. So I think Russia has consistently surprised me and that's why I think Russia is really worth watching because I think Russia is very, very able to defy our expectations. Like I just don't think we can predict what's gonna happen there at all. And the last question. Negative bloggers. Negative bloggers. Yeah, so I've definitely, you know. Nationalists, sorry. Yeah, no, I've definitely. Sort of the same view, the same thing in my view. Yeah, actually, so Emery actually asked me a question about this on the podcast right before this. And yes, I have met nationalist bloggers, especially in China. And you know, they're a formidable force, you know? And I think one thing I'm not saying in this book, that everybody who gathers online is gathering as a force for good or as a force for democracy. There are definitely people who are, have less, I don't know, admirable views, right? I mean, maybe they're promoting violence, maybe they're promoting nationalism. So yeah, I have met them. I mean, nationalism in China is quite interesting because the conventional wisdom on online national in China has always been that the government promotes it and that they're stirring it up. But I found that often online nationalism exceeds what the government wanted. And so they tend to be victims of censorship as well. Right there in front of you, Kirsten. Right? Yeah. Hello, my name is Oliver Krimmer. I'm a correspondent for an Austrian newspaper here in DC. Did you find that revolutionary conditions in any of the three countries you mentioned? And in its absence, what good is the internet? Anyway, doesn't it simply sort of put people who would be isolated, apathetic, and feared in the real world into that same condition in a virtual world? Thank you. So no, do I think that these countries are in a revolutionary situation at this second? Not necessarily. Do I think that could change quite quickly? Yes. However, I definitely disagree with the statement that if there's not a revolutionary situation, the internet isn't doing anything. You know, I think that's, you know, we were just talking about this also. I think there has been this kind of binary equation that people talk about here. It's like, well, is the internet creating revolution or not? And if the internet's not creating revolution, it's not doing anything. And I firmly disagree with that. You know, like you take China, for example, and I think the internet has already transformed China. I think it's really hard to argue with that. You know, I mean, first of all, the government can no longer completely control the flow of information. They try really hard, and they can control a lot of it, but not all of it. Information always gets through. It always, always gets through. Second, you know, people are using internet tool, online tools to demand accountability, to demand transparency, to demand a response from officials, and often they're getting it. And so the internet has created a world of possibilities in China that just didn't exist before. So no, is there a Chinese revolution? No, but that doesn't mean that China is not a radically different place. Also, I think the important thing to remember is to sort of be careful what you wish for, right? A lot of people here say, well, where's the revolution in China? But what would a revolution in China look like, right? I think that China's not really there at this moment. And I think if you went and asked the average Chinese person, do you want a revolution? They wouldn't say yes, right now. They wouldn't, because who would run China? You know, I mean, it's not there. And I think, you know, with the Arab Spring, everyone was kind of cheering on the Egyptian revolutionaries. And then once revolution happened, everyone was like, oh, these guys, they never, they don't have a plan. These guys are losers, but you know what I mean? I think you have to be really careful just, yeah, what you wish for. And so a lot of the activists in my book are not actually working for revolution. They're working for evolution, right? They're working to make their countries better. And they're working to like give more citizens a voice and kind of make their governments more open and transparent. And in many ways, they're succeeding, so. Certainly when I lived in Shanghai from 2007 to 2008, which is still relatively early, I was stunned by the role of the netizens. So admittedly, I'm reading the China Daily and I'm reading it in English and I'm aware that I'm reading in part what lots of people in the Chinese government want me to read. Even so, the sense that the netizens were a whole part of the population who had to be responded to, even if it was to shift cultures kabuki a little bit. But that was very surprising to me. I just, you know, this notion there was a Chinese internet public. And I would not have said that before. There definitely is. And you know, so there's a handful of people in this book who are more like your traditional dissident types, right? You know, the guys who talk about freedom and equality and whatever. But there's a lot of other quieter Chinese internet stories that are less known here, you know? And one of the bloggers in this book made a really interesting statement. He said, Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice, right? So what does that mean? It's an interesting statement, it's somewhat controversial. What he was saying is that if you ask a lot of people in China about these kind of abstract goals of freedom of speech or freedom of information, it's not gonna resonate, right? But people want justice. And if they see that a local official is messing with their family, if they see that somebody is taking their house or their land without compensation, if somebody's getting beaten for no reason, they're gonna want justice and they're gonna wanna write about that online. And if somebody is censoring that, they're gonna fight back, right? So there's all these little battles that are being fought on the internet in China that are not like, they're not about this abstract idea, like we just wanna have Western freedom of speech. It's like we wanna use the internet to get the justice that we deserve. Thank you, yep, in the back there. Hi, Anna Swanson. I'm a student at SICE and also a researcher here at New America. I was wondering, you were kind of alluding to this with your last conversation, but your thoughts on the success of authoritarian governments in policing the internet. I mean, the internet in China, for example, the internet has definitely transformed society, but at the same time, I would say, I mean, I think that the government may have been more successful in policing the internet and squashing dissent than some people in the West thought it would be five or 10 years ago. But I'm curious to hear what you think of that. So I think that's true. You know, I think again, this is one of these false binary situations, right? You know, if you write a book about the power of the internet, people say, well, but what about the governments? And it's like, yeah, I know. I mean, I'm not denying that at all. Like, again, if you read this book, you will see a lot of harrowing stories about how the governments are trying to intimidate these bloggers. And I will not for a second deny that that's happening and I will not deny that the governments are effective. But I think in many cases, these governments are on the defensive. You know, I think that, you know, you take Russia for example, you know, for a few years they didn't bother messing with the internet at all because they didn't have to. The internet was so kind of limpid and nobody was using it. And now you're starting to see all these kind of blacklists and anti-extremism laws. And it's because the Russian authorities woke up and they said, this is a threat. You know, so often in my experience, the, as the government ramps up control of the internet, it's usually a testament to the internet's power, right? Why would they do that otherwise? Why would they exert so much time and so much effort and so much hardware into controlling the internet if the internet wasn't a threat, right? So the two kind of go hand in hand. And it is a cat and mouse game. It's a cliche, but it's true. I mean, it's not, you know, there's no clear like winner or loser. There's always going to be a struggle. But I have not seen any case in which, you know, any of these governments have been able to completely control the flow of information. And in that sense, they are not winning, right? I mean, because they could have done that more effectively before. Well, and this is where, for me, reading your book, it comes back to the psychological effect. Because even if you shut down the actual protests, the actual links, the psychology, the sense that I'm not alone, the sense that I act like a free man, the sense that I can have, I can make a difference, those things can't be put back in the bottle. Yeah, you just said that much better than, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's kind of the whole point of the book, right? Is that we tend to talk about this kind of internet versus authoritarianism in terms of like how many words were censored, how many websites were shut down, how many bloggers were put in jail. And that's all relevant, and that's important. But the psychological elements, which are much more abstract, are impossible to erase, right? And when you kind of have this realization online, I'm not alone, I am not afraid, and I'm ready to take action, like censoring a website is not going to reverse that, right? And you have that realization online, but it's still an offline realization. It changes who you are, and it changes what you're ready to do, you know? One last question. Becky wants to ask a question. Kind of going off of that. I'm curious, oh, Becky Schaffer, New America. I'm curious, you talk about the importance of a revolutionary spark, and the apathy, the isolation, the fear, but how important is a narrative in creating the revolution? And with social media like Twitter, where there's such a limited space to tell someone's story or to share a narrative, how do you think that the role of narrative is changing in revolutions? I love that question, that's a great question. I come from a literature background, so I love questions about narrative. So yeah, I actually, you know, I'm really interested in the idea of narrative, and I'm really interested in the idea of, you know, who tells the story of a country, right? And so, you know, there's all sorts of work on this, and I'm sure you're familiar with this idea of like national narratives, right? And that national identity to some extent is dictated by, you know, a story, like a shared story. And when you have these countries where, you know, the past, present, and future of the nation is entirely dictated by the state, right? They're telling the story of that country. And then you have these bloggers who are kind of reclaiming that narrative, right? And I find that really fascinating and really empowering. And you see that in Cuba, you know, bloggers basically express that in so many words. They said, I'm gonna tell the story of my country, like as I see it and as I feel it. And they're kind of reclaiming the national narrative. I mean, your point about Twitter, that's well taken, but, you know, a lot of this is also happening kind of in blog form. And some of it is just, you know, it's just about different versions of the narrative, you know? And I think for people in countries where it's all the authoritarian narrative, that's very debilitating. And when they can kind of take it back and tell the story as they see it, it's an empowering thing. Well, so I have to, we'll end on that note, but the one, maybe this is a final question, I'm reading John Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson. For those of you who've come to many of these events, you can see how long it's gonna take me to get through it, because I've been saying this for a month or so. But, you know, it is so striking, all the documents that we have, right? I mean, that he wrote, you know, wrote constant letters that, and we have that, our national narrative is so shaped by our conception of the revolution and the way that gave rise to it. And so one thing I do wonder is, how on earth are we gonna tell this story looking back? I mean, you know, I'm not sure that even a million tweets adds up to the Declaration of Independence or a letter or the Federalist Papers or any of that. I mean, how, good note to end on, you are somebody who has a literary background, if you haven't seen it, there's this just wonderful book review of Emily's book by Mario Vargas Llosa, who sort of fuses the two, the politics and the great, great novelists. But, you know, what will happen to these narratives if they're all tweets and blog posts? Yeah, it's a real problem. I mean, even the kind of effort I had to make just to kind of get these things in this book. And it's funny because there is a certain blogger personality where they're just not interested in what happened the year before, you know? And, you know, it's kind of like, oh, so you wrote this thing in 2008 and they're like, that's ancient history. Like, I don't even use that tool anymore. But yeah, no, it's really, I mean, just trying to kind of track these things down and kind of create this story was challenging. Yeah, I mean, because these websites, they disappear. And not simply because of censorship, but yeah, it's a fleeting story and I tried to document it as best as I could. So we not only have a new profession of digital curator, we're gonna need digital historians and they're gonna be able to rescue floppy disks and things, you know, what we think about it. I mean, I have a whole 10 years of my life on floppy disks that I can't read anymore and most people here don't even know what are. So anyway, so hang around a little bit. Emily's gonna sign some books and we have refreshments and drinks and it's wonderful to see all of you and give Emily and her wonderful book now I know who my comrades are, a round of applause. Thank you.