A lot of people thought the internet would help democratize the world.
More people and groups would have access to information, and the ability to mobilize from the ground up would gradually undermine concentrations of power—that was the idea, at least.
But the reality has been quite different: Instead of democratizing the world, the internet has destabilized it, creating new cleavages and reinforcing the power structure at the same time.
This is the story sociologist Jen Schradie tells in her new book The Revolution That Wasn’t. Schradie argues that technology is not only failing to level the playing field for activists, it’s actually making things worse by “creating a digital activism gap.” The differences in power and organization, she says, have undercut working-class movements and bolstered authoritarian groups.
Authoritarian countries like Russia and China use the Internet differently from other places. Also, the rise of the far right has been startling. From the author: "The simple answer is that conservatives are more likely to have more resources and to take advantage of that. The other is that they’re more likely to have hierarchical infrastructures that make it easier to engage the digital labor that’s needed to promote online activism. In other words, they tend to have more top-down organizations, and that’s just a more efficient way to distribute labor and get the message out."