Remember when the social media were the Solution to All Our Global Problems?

Remember when the social media were the Solution to All Our Global Problems (SAOGP)?

Cyberutopians proclaimed that the "Arab Spring" could not have occurred without Facebook/Twitter. Iran youth was "Western" because it used social media.

Oh-so-publicity-conscious Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, former State Department politically-appointed apostles of how virtual communications would free the world, are now both off the MSM radar screen and in the "private sector" -- I hope for them making big bucks.

But instead of universal love and peace, proclaimed by the cyberutopians, we now see the social media being used in the most Hobbesian sense -- survival of fittest -- by states. Just take a look at the bitter, crude exchanges between the State Department and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (documented in recent issues of the Public Diplomacy Press and Bog Review).

I forgot to say: "ridiculous" exchanges.

Meanwhile, one of the most intelligent skeptics of cyberutopianism -- Evgeny Morozov -- is strangely silent, at least in the public sphere at the moment.

Maybe Morozov -- a thinker, not a snake-oil salesman like so many cyberutopian enthusiasts now making big bucks -- feels that he was right all along, and has no need to comment further on the social media being eventually used as crude realpolitik/authoritarian weapons, not gentle tools in bringing about universal democracy/harmony.

The historical pattern is a long one: The state takes the new media over to push its propaganda, with movies in WWI, radio in WWII, TV/videos in the Cold War, email right after the Cold War, new social media in our century.

Nothing is ever quite new under the sun.

Image from