Ludwig Holmberg says:

Hi Jillian et al.,

Certainly none of us in the US actually counts the votes or sees how democratic the system truly is. We trust others that the vote counts are accurate – that’s just a fact. To the vast majority, then, it is just as opaque a system as this crowdsourced initiative. Assuming Egyptians trust this agency then it is an article of faith that it is democratic and operating on sound principles – just like our vote-counting system and procedure in the States. I am always wary of individuals positing – in an Orientalist fashion – that third world agencies and systems are opaque when so much of what is done in our name in the US – slaughtering of thousands via drone strike, for instance – is just as opaque. Certainly we have a greater degree of openness here on *some* things, but using absolutist language like opaque and transparent actually hinders discussion.

While I certainly agree that all governments favor certain groups over others – scholarly literature on poverty in the US gives an example in a democratic nation – the issue is not a perfect protection of minorities as that does not exist anywhere on earth. At one level everyone is a minority of oneself – much of the ties that bind us are illusionary or fabricated (see Benedict Anderson) and so even the concept of minority becomes immensely problematic. Ideally, then, as I see your argument the problem is not one of the minority, but rather the idea that the colonialist creation of Egypt in the Western nation-state model is the issue. That such a diverse group of individual human beings cannot possibly be reasonably represented or governed by such an abstract entity as the Egyptian government. That is something that is reasonable to discuss, but once we venture into the topic of protecting minority rights we then begin to arbitrarily decide *who* is a minority. Certainly groups have the democratic right to decide what they want or don’t want – be it if they don’t want crime or if they don’t want certain types of information. The issue is the fact that Egypt is a colonialist entity which – as you rightfully argue – incapable of dealing with the diversity present on the ground.

Regarding mass-filtering technologies – it is not the introduction of those which is the issue. The structure of the Internet itself – the ways in which information is represented, sorted, and exchanged – lends itself to being open to filtering. In other words, filtering is in the Internet’s “bones”. Blaming the filtering technologies is a non-issue: the issue of Internet censorship is structural in the Internet itself as well as cultural. The potential to filter (and to circumvent, mind) is embedded in the protocols as well as embedded within the culture which seeks to act upon the potentialities in those protocols.

I am certainly not arguing for censorship, but rather that for “freedom to information” to be a freedom, a human right, the converse has to be respected as well otherwise it becomes a dictate – an order – resembling a totalitarian imposition of “freedom to information”. Individuals and groups must have the right to decide for themselves what they want or do not want to have access to in order to further and promote their own collective or individual visions of their mores and values. However, the idea that the decision should be forced on individuals rescales society to the level of the individual and away from a collective society itself. It then seems that the same problem which Montesquieu hints at plagues us: namely, whether or not democratic (or let’s expand that in keeping with my theme – social/cultural as well) institutions can survive at larger scales. The U.S. has staked its opinion and it seems as if Egypt is stating its own. They are different ways of dealing with this problem: one individualistically and one collectively.

Thanks for the interesting debate, I have enjoyed it but will no longer reply as I do have to attend to things which are less interesting but more financially fruitful than this wonderful discussion.