My job involves writing about how the Internet is important to fostering human rights and economic prosperity, and how clever activists can use technologies – such as the mobile phones and video —  to defend freedom.  But all along I’ve known that if the “good guys” can find ways to use technology to help humanity, the “bad guys” can find ways to use the same technology to suppress human rights.  Even activists who are steadfast about the positive use of the Internet as a tool for promoting democracy and human rights recognize that repressive governments are determined to “fight fire with fire.”

But the most depressing assessment of the failure of the Internet to usher in a new era of freedom and political activism that I’ve come across to date is in May/June edition of Foreign Policy.  In an article called “Think Again: The Internet,” Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger who focuses on the political effects of the internet, shoots down every platitude you might have heard about the Internet being a force for good.

“A networked world is not inherently a more just world,” Morozov says, and may have created “a confusing news junkyard” for many of its users.

“Two decades in,” Morozov writes, “the Internet has neither brought down dictators” nor “ushered in a post-political age of rational and data-driven policymaking.”  The Internet, he says, is “a hypercharged version of the real world, with all of its promise and perils.”  That may be true, but I still can’t help but think that the Internet provides the best platform to date to promote human rights values and expose abuses.  What do you think?