The virtual world is a 'public square' much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can't send in the tanks to crush the netizens.
Interpretation
The virtual world is an expansive platform for public discourse that cannot be easily controlled or suppressed.
Jared Cohen's quote highlights the difference between physical control over a space, like Tiananmen Square, and the challenges of governing the vast and dynamic nature of the internet. In the digital age, the internet serves as a public square for free expression, where attempts to suppress voices are met with resistance, making it difficult for authorities to impose control as they might in real-life protests.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about internet censorship policies.
Technology is a tool, and it's a platform. Nobody gets arrested for being a blogger; people get arrested for dissent. Nobody gets arrested for putting information about themselves online; they get arrested for being an activist. I'm a strong believer in the fact that you should not blame the tools; you should blame the circumstances.
Name any issue in the world, I can tell you how technology is intertwined with it. I can tell you how technology will make it better. How it can make it worse. It needs to be part of everything that we do, whether you are a government or a company or a citizen.
I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.
On the Internet, it's survival of the easiest.... Give users a good experience and they're apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But ... it's easy to turn to another supplier in the face of even a minor hiccup. Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around.
Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.
For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.
More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
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