The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane, 408 pp, £14.99, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 84614 353 3

Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran by Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp, £14.99, September 2010, ISBN 978 1 84511 607 1

On a balmy evening in April 2009 Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with helmets and flak jackets, had been bundled around Baghdad in an armoured convoy, meeting anyone there was to meet. They’d been introduced to the prime minister’s council of advisers, glad-handed the Iraqi Investment National Commission and spoken to a group of engineering students from Baghdad University; they’d even had time to fit in a visit to the Iraqi National Museum. Among them were several high-ranking engineers from Google, the founder of the community organising tool Meetup, a vice-president of the firm behind the blogging platform WordPress, and an executive from Blue State Digital, the internet strategy firm that had done a fair bit to help Obama to the presidency the previous November.

The person getting all the attention was Dorsey, because by then Twitter was all anyone wanted to talk about. In fact one reason we know so much about the trip is that Dorsey and his colleagues spent much of their time tweeting about it, sending news of their journey in electronic haiku to their followers back home. ‘Lots of helicopters,’ Dorsey observed on his Twitter feed: ‘Met the president of Iraq. Amazing palace.’ In another tweet, he tells his followers that he’s been ‘talking to Iraqis to figure out if technologies like Twitter can help bring transparency, accessibility and stability to the area’. When he finds a wi-fi network in the presidential palace, he says how happy he is to be back online: ‘Catching up on the rest of the world.’ ‘Lots going on out there!’ he writes. Barham Salih’s inaugural tweet was less upbeat: ‘Sorry, my first tweet not pleasant; dust storm in Baghdad today & yet another suicide bomb. Awful reminder that it is not yet all fine here.’

This was the first time the US government had organised a new media delegation to a country in the Middle East. The idea was to introduce the minds behind America’s internet start-ups to the movers and shakers who were going to rebuild Iraq, but as Dorsey’s excitable tweets indicated, the audience back home was just as important. The trip’s architect was a 27-year-old State Department wunderkind called Jared Cohen. He shepherded the techies around Baghdad and explained the thinking behind the whole venture at a video-link press conference with journalists back in Washington:

You know, historically, we’ve thought about new technology as a tool primarily for communication. But more and more, we’re looking at, how do we leverage new technology to support broader policy objectives, you know, whether it’s civic empowerment, whether it’s capacity building, whether it’s promotion of accountability and transparency, and so forth. So logically, in looking at these two concepts, we started reaching out to Silicon Valley, or the larger technology industry.

Some of the journalists wanted to know how all this new technology was going to help a country that couldn’t guarantee its citizens round-the-clock electricity, but Cohen stood his ground. One reason for the huge take-up of mobile phones in Iraq, he pointed out, was the worsening security situation: people needed to keep track of friends and loved ones, to make sure they were still in one piece. As for using America’s technological expertise as a diplomatic tool: that, Cohen believed, was a no-brainer. ‘At the end of the day, the platforms that all of these guys here are pushing out from the tech industry are riddled with American values of critical thinking, free flow of information, freedom of choice, freedom of assembly.’ ‘Wow, my God, they have a lot of Kool-Aid over there, don’t they?’ a journalist said at the end of the press conference.

The high-tech Kool-Aid had been brewing at the State Department since Cohen’s arrival some years before. Condoleezza Rice had spotted him first. He had impressed her by inveigling his way in to meet her when she was national security adviser, and in 2006 she snapped him up for the State Department – the youngest ever member of its policy planning team. He was only 24, and his job was to advise on how to use social media to advance America’s interests in the Middle East, especially among the young. It helped that he’d actually been there. While at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he had used the pretext of his postgraduate research to travel widely throughout the region. His book Children of Jihad, published two years after he began working at the State Department, recounts his brushes with danger in the style of a Famous Five novel.[*] In Beirut he befriends some Hizbullah supporters at a McDonald’s; in Tehran he manages to get himself invited to underground parties (‘I’m not generally a big drinker, but who could resist the opportunity to booze it up when the mullahs weren’t looking?’); in Syria he falls asleep in the back of a cab and wakes up in Iraq. And all the time he’s asking questions, sometimes out loud. In Lebanon he hands out a survey: ‘In one sentence, if the United States could change anything to gain the support of the youth, what should it do?’ The answers aren’t encouraging: one young Lebanese reports that ‘America is the biggest imperialist and the only thing I want is to see America destroyed.’ Before long his new Hizbullah friends begin to wonder about his motives, and stop inviting him to McDonald’s. ‘They became totally unresponsive,’ Cohen remembers, ‘and I began to wonder why.’

Children of Jihad is written with the exuberance of a hipster on his year off, but it isn’t stupid. The young people Cohen encounters have little faith in the authoritarian regimes that govern them, but they also remind him that Western military intervention would only make things worse. His experiences leave Cohen with firm convictions on how to foment change in the Middle East. ‘The youth can only be understood as their own phenomenon,’ he says:

They are far more tolerant than older generations and seemingly more sophisticated … The internet is their democratic society. Even though the internet is monitored, the youth have become extremely sophisticated in getting around the surveillance. They have become digital revolutionaries, creating, participating in, and popularising chat rooms, blogs and forums for discussion about everything from sports to politics.

His book ends with a rallying cry: ‘Young people in the Middle East are reachable – and they could be waiting to hear from us.’

Cohen’s arrival at the State Department coincided with a fresh outburst of hostilities between the Bush administration and Iran, and one consequence was that the State Department was granted $75 million to disseminate propaganda and help elements hostile to the Iranian regime. But then it became clear that simply throwing money around was making America more enemies than friends. Meanwhile, away from the public sabre-rattling, Cohen was building bridges with big internet companies like YouTube and Twitter, making allies by arguing for the cause of social media and generally getting a sense of what was possible. He was also making friends on Facebook. At the beginning of 2008, a Colombian Facebook group called ‘One million voices against FARC’ sprang up in Barranquilla to campaign against the guerrillas; the computer technician behind it was surprised to receive a message from Cohen, asking if he could pay him a visit.

A few weeks after Obama’s victory, James Glassman, another Bush-era official at the State Department, delivered a lecture at the New America Foundation in which he made much of the internet. Glassman had been to Bogotá with Cohen, and began by telling the story of the One Million Voices campaign. Attempts to engage with foreign citizens used to mean thinking up educational and cultural schemes to get America’s side of the story across, he said, but that sort of thing was now out of date. ‘We have arrived at the view that the best way to achieve our goals in public diplomacy is through a new approach to communicating, an approach that is made far easier because of the emergence of Web 2.0, or social networking technologies. We call our new approach Public Diplomacy 2.0.’

Public Diplomacy 2.0 was more than a technology: it was ‘a holistic approach, an attitude’. What’s more, it was already happening. ‘Our Digital Outreach Team goes onto blogs and websites. In Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and we hope soon in Russian, its members identify themselves as State Department representatives. They engage in the conversation, gently inform, correct distortions about US policies.’ America’s terrorist enemies were no match for all this interactivity. ‘Extremists can’t adapt to social networking because it shakes the foundations of their whacked out, rigid ideology.’ (By then, though, the ideology of the Bush administration was looking a little whacked out too.)

To the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and her senior advisers the idea of doing foreign policy on Facebook threw up intriguing possibilities. Stripped of its air of gung-ho propagandising and reworked as a campaign for internet freedom in places like Iran, American outreach would sit very nicely with Obama’s campaign pledge to put a friendlier face on American power. Cohen, who by then was championing Facebook as ‘one of the most organic tools for democracy promotion’, was just the man. Not only was he allowed to keep his job: he was made chair of a new working group on the internet. In May 2009 the new approach was given its first major public outing, and a fresh lick of paint. ‘Twenty-first-century statecraft’, Hillary Clinton said in a series of choreographed speeches, was about using the internet to work from the ‘bottom up’: it was less about telling people what to think than about encouraging them to stand up for their right to talk among themselves and, if they wished, to the United States. Just as America’s Cold Warriors had used Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom to tear down the Berlin Wall, the campaign for internet freedom could help tear down the firewalls authoritarian regimes have erected around their populations, and throw a lifeline to the dissidents inside.

There were reasons for thinking that something was afoot. In April last year thousands of protesters took to the streets in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, to complain about vote-rigging; observers noticed that some were using Twitter, and the revolt was dubbed ‘the Twitter revolution’. Two months later, after a disputed presidential election on 12 June, hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured onto the streets of Tehran and other cities in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of the defeated candidates. For some days the government-controlled media pretended nothing much was happening. Twitter and other social networking sites, on the other hand, were buzzing with news of upcoming rallies; events were being analysed as they happened and, during the crackdown, anyone with a mobile phone could see shocking images of the brutality meted out by the police and the Basij militia. In a series of blog posts fired off within hours of the first demonstrations, the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan proclaimed Twitter ‘the critical tool for organising the resistance in Iran’. In a piece of electronic agitprop he declared that ‘the revolution will be twittered.’ The technophiles in Washington didn’t disagree.

One of the most vocal enthusiasts of the new developments was a teacher of interactive telecommunications at NYU called Clay Shirky. Shirky is a witty and engaging writer. His book Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together had been published not long before, and in the theology of internet evangelism it was already considered a foundational text.[†] Here Comes Everybody is full of stories that make collective action sound like a marvellous wheeze: the woman who lost her mobile in the back of a taxi and used the internet to get it back, the 100 young New Yorkers who were persuaded by an anonymous email to converge on Macy’s department store and stare in silence together at an expensive rug.

Shirky argued that the internet had opened up the possibility of an exciting new form of leaderless social co-ordination. From now on, he said, blogging and online social networking were going to be central to political liberty. ‘To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others. With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly.’ Taking the example of a group of Belarusian activists who’d outflanked the secret police by organising their demo on a blog, Shirky predicted that the internet would prove especially useful in countries where the government keeps a tight rein on the means of communication, because dissidents could use it to give the authorities the slip. ‘The government can’t intercept the group members in advance, because there is no group in advance.’ Earlier in June Shirky had topped the bill at a techno-boosterish TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference at the State Department. ‘This is it,’ he said as events unfolded in Iran. ‘The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.’

From his office in the State Department Cohen, too, was keeping a close eye on the flood of Iran-related tweets. On Monday 15 June, as the post-election protests gathered pace and a massive rally was held to support him, Mousavi alerted his followers on Twitter that the social networking site was about to carry out a routine shutdown to overhaul its system. Cohen, who was already working closely with Jack Dorsey, emailed him directly to suggest delaying the upgrade. Twitter complied, announcing on its website that because of ‘the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran’ it was putting off its scheduled system maintenance until Tuesday afternoon, when it would be the middle of the night in Tehran.

Cohen’s email wasn’t well timed. Earlier that month Obama had delivered his Cairo speech, in which he admitted the CIA’s role in overthrowing Iran’s democratic government in 1953. On the day the New York Times broke the story of Cohen’s email, Obama said that, given the history of relations between the two countries, America could not be seen to be ‘meddling in Iranian elections’. At a press conference a State Department official denied that Cohen’s move amounted to meddling and played down its significance. ‘This is completely consistent with our national policy,’ he said. ‘We are proponents of freedom of expression.’ Whether or not Cohen wrong-footed his superiors, his intervention did his cause no harm. In July the US Senate authorised a fund of $20 million to build websites and software to help Iranians share and receive information under the radar of their government.

Obama too seemed to warm to the internet as a tool for geo-politicking. In a speech to Chinese students in November, he answered a planted question about internet censorship (it was submitted via the US Embassy website and asked by the US ambassador): ‘I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can call their own government to account.’ In January this year Google announced that hackers had tried to break into the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents, and that it was considering withdrawing from the country altogether. Google’s decision came a few days after Cohen had brought another delegation, including Dorsey and Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, to Washington for a private dinner with Hillary Clinton and her staff. A week later Clinton spoke out even more strongly in defence of internet freedom and the role of the Obama administration in securing it. Seconding Obama’s warning to the Chinese, she argued that new tools and fresh policies were needed ‘to develop our capacity for what we call at the State Department 21st-century statecraft’; announced an initiative to help activists dodge internet surveillance; and urged American companies to take the lead in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship. ‘The freedom to connect,’ she said, ‘is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully co-operate.’ Twenty-first-century freedom, if it was going to mean anything, was going to mean the freedom to use Twitter.

Does Twitter have the power that is claimed for it? Some evidence from the contested Iranian election is presented in Death to the Dictator!, the first book-length account of the activist movement’s rise and fall. The book claims to be the work of an Iranian journalist writing under a pseudonym, and it mostly describes the experience of an (also pseudonymous) young man from Tehran who is swept up in the excitement and then arrested and tortured by the Basij militia. What starts out as a campaign alleging electoral fraud in support of a defeated politician quickly spirals into something more interesting: a chaotic uprising against the clerics and the Revolutionary Guards which, had it continued to spread and gather momentum, might have threatened the foundations of the Islamic Republic. Social media, however, play a minor role in Afsaneh Moqadam’s story, and an ambiguous one. At first the protesters are happy to use their mobiles to let each other know about upcoming rallies, and to share images of the demonstrations on YouTube. Soon, however, they grow wary of the rush of information. ‘Cellphone cameras, Facebook, Twitter, the satellite stations,’ the anonymous narrator complains: ‘The media are supposed to reflect what is going on, but they seem, in fact, to be making everything happen much faster. There’s no time to argue what it all means.’ Many come to believe that Western mobile phone companies have supplied the Iranian government with software to enable them to eavesdrop on their conversations. Some even fear that their mobiles have become bugging devices.

Before long the protagonist is urging his fellow activists not to bring their mobiles on demonstrations – if they lose them or drop them, they will be traced back to their owners. On one of the later demos, he notices someone surreptitiously taking pictures of himself and his fellow demonstrators on his mobile phone. Then he sees a photo of himself on a pro-government website that is soliciting help in identifying the troublemakers – a novel application of what internet gurus call ‘crowdsourcing’. It’s only after the crackdown on 20 June that the protesters retreat to their apartments to spend hours on the internet, sharing anti-filtering software and searching for scraps of news on Facebook, YouTube and reformist websites. And it’s now that the authorities clamp down hard: the internet is often blocked or so slow that it almost comes to a halt and the mobile network is often switched off, making it impossible to send texts. When service is finally restored, one semi-serious suggestion passed around among the activists is that they abandon the entire medium: ‘Boycott SMSs! That will cost the telecoms a packet!’

If Death to the Dictator! has little time for Twitter, that’s hardly surprising. When you look at the figures you realise that only a very small number of Iranians were using it. In 2009, according to a firm called Sysomos which analyses social media, there were 19,235 Twitter accounts in Iran – 0.03 per cent of the population. Researchers at al-Jazeera found only 60 Twitter accounts active in Tehran at the time of the demonstrations, which fell to six after the crackdown. There’s certainly a growing internet culture in Iran – in Blogistan, the media academics Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany estimate that there are about 70,000 active blogs in the country, including a vibrant gay blogosphere – but it’s far from being the preserve of liberal reformists. Ahmadinejad’s supporters used Facebook and Twitter to spread his campaign messages while, on the other side, someone set up a Facebook group called ‘I bet I can find 1 million people who dislike Ahmadinejad’ (it had attracted 26,000 followers by April 2010). There’s little evidence, however, that any of this internet activity fuelled the street demonstrations; most were organised by word of mouth and text messages sent to friends. But the internet helped protesters bypass the state media and, for the few information-hungry Iranians who had it, Twitter allowed news to be sent out of the country when the authorities were blocking the mobile network. Even here, however, the global solidarity it bought for their cause might well have distracted them from the real work of reaching out to their fellow citizens.

It was more useful for the global media. ‘Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices, that simply slowed the general speed of traffic,’ the authors of Blogistan conclude. On 16 June the authorities forbade journalists from covering the demonstrations without permission. Kicking their heels in their hotel rooms, most foreign correspondents began surfing through the blizzard of tweets and video clips to try and work out what was going on. But it was all difficult to verify, and a good part was tweeted from outside the country: to add to the chaos, many overseas sympathisers had changed their location to make it look as if they were in Iran. The point – perhaps – was to confuse the Iranian authorities by opening the information gates, but the flood of unverifiable tweets may have confused the protesters too. Some of what was sent around on Twitter – the news, for example, that Mousavi had been arrested – simply wasn’t true, so the movement’s high-profile foreign supporters were often retweeting rumour and disinformation from the comfort of their desktops. ‘Here, there is lots of buzz,’ the owner of a US-based activist site told the Washington Post. ‘But once you look … you see most of it is Americans tweeting among themselves.’

The Iranian protesters had every reason to be paranoid about the internet. While some demonstrators were busy drumming up virtual support from the outside world, the police were scanning social networking sites to round them up. According to Evgeny Morozov, the Iranian authorities and their allies were quick to get into the swing, and were soon flooding mobile networks and the internet with false information and videos of dubious authenticity as a way of intimidating, dividing or demoralising the opposition. ‘Dear citizen,’ one cheery text sent to known protesters began, ‘according to received information, you have been influenced by the destabilising propaganda which the media affiliated with foreign countries have been disseminating.’ Morozov, an alumnus of George Soros’s Open Society Institute who blogs for Foreign Policy magazine, knows from his native Belarus that electronic activism doesn’t necessarily blow the doors off repressive regimes. Even if the authorities lose their monopoly on the flow of information, he shows in The Net Delusion, they gain access to a new kind of social control: the ability to manipulate the flow, and ear-wig at the other end. Regime loyalists can be called on to post propaganda of their own; the Kremlin has cultivated a whole school of young bloggers to propagate conspiracies about supposed threats to Russian sovereignty.

And it’s now cheaper than ever for authoritarian regimes to keep an eye on what their citizens are up to. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2009, a marketing manager for a Chinese data-mining firm claimed that the Chinese authorities have been able to cut the size of their internet monitoring staff by a factor of ten thanks to efficiency savings. ‘In the past, the KGB resorted to torture to learn of connections between activists,’ Morozov says. ‘Today, they simply need to get on Facebook.’ Since members of social networks can remain anonymous, Morozov notes, it would be unwise to use them to organise a semi-secret demo. The problem for the demonstrators in Tehran was that their movement lacked any clear direction beyond its demand that the election be annulled. The invention of a new kind of networked, shiftless, leaderless, just-in-time disorganised organisation didn’t seem to help. In the late 1990s Alan Greenspan ridiculed the fashionable notion that the dot-com economy could overturn the traditional laws of economic profit and loss: he called it ‘irrational exuberance’. There is now an irrational exuberance about the potential of social media: it’s as if online social networking could rescue the media, restore democracy and liberate the wretched of the earth, one tweet at a time.

But why did so many people want Twitter to win? For the US, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to see the attraction. With the neoconservative plan to export freedom and democracy to the Middle East in ruins, it was cheaper and more subtle for the State Department to rally around the cause of internet freedom – to send in what Morozov calls the ‘cyber-cons’. At some point, however, the rhetoric of internet freedom led to the shakier proposition that citizens of authoritarian regimes could win their freedom by doing no more than getting together on the net.

The dangers of encouraging activists to rely on technology were vividly illustrated when a State Department plan to help Iranian dissidents outwit the police by distributing anti-surveillance software backfired. The software was called Haystack, and last March the State Department granted it a rare licence enabling it to be exported to Iran; since Haystack was the only software of its kind to be afforded such a licence, this amounted to an official seal of approval. Then it was discovered to be wholly unsafe – ‘the worst piece of software I have ever had the displeasure of ripping apart’, according to the computer security expert Morozov consulted. Amid mounting criticism of their efforts, some of it from Iranian dissidents, the people behind Haystack finally threw up their hands in September and admitted the weaknesses of their system (its leading developer signed off with a tweet: ‘A whirlwind is coming straight for me … I flee’). In the propaganda war inside Iran, episodes like this give the government a valuable weapon. For big American internet companies like Google and Twitter, the danger is that their interests come to be too closely defined with those of the American government: that they’re seen to be smuggling in statecraft under the guise of delivering technology. In the conspiracy mills of the Middle East, campaigns for internet freedom are denounced as cover for America’s broader agenda, the stalking horse for a shady new military-Twitter complex.

None of this seems to have blunted the State Department’s enthusiasm for its new approach, and the status and the visibility of bureaucrats like Jared Cohen has been greatly enhanced. Since that initial visit to Iraq, Cohen and his colleague Alec Ross, who worked on Obama’s presidential campaign, have led a series of technology delegations to any number of countries – among them, Afghanistan, Mexico and Russia. In between, they’re busy tweeting. With their backslapping banter punctuated with words like ‘dude’ and ‘awesome’, the pair come across as the Bill and Ted of 21st-century statecraft, on an excellent adventure to bring the wonders of social media to the rest of the world. Leading a contingent to Syria in June, Cohen tweeted: ‘I’m not kidding when I say I just had the greatest frappuccino ever at Kalamoun University north of Damascus’; later, Ross updated his Twitter feed with the news that Cohen had challenged the Syrian telecoms minister to a cake-eating competition. This is popular stuff, enough to have turned the pair into mini-celebrities in the world of Twitter: Cohen has more than 300,000 followers. On 100 consecutive days earlier this year, he took the trouble to tweet reminders of the 100 most heinous days of the Rwandan genocide. In September Google announced that it had head-hunted him from the State Department to run its new geopolitical think-tank, Google Ideas. The revolt of the geeks has only just begun.

[*] Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels among the Youth of the Middle East (Gotham, 288 pp., $15, August 2008, 978 1 59240 399 8).

[†] Penguin, 352 pp., £ 9.99, January 2009, 978 0 14 103062 3.

March 13, 2000

LENGTH: 1753 words

HEADLINE: Sartre, Bogart and the last puff of freedom; Smoking once meant glamour and romance; now, the smoker is victim and polluter. By James Harkin

BYLINE: James Harkin

BODY:
Imagine, as a friend of mine did recently, the following morbid and highly improbable scenario. You’re a passenger on an aircraft that loses control on landing. Your plane bounces head-over-heels down the runway, disintegrates and then bursts into flames, leaving you behind on the tarmac: the sole survivor of a horrific crash. Many of us would be paralysed by shock, overcome with guilt or left muttering an instinctive hymn of gratitude to a long- forgotten deity. Not my friend. As he saw it, the trauma would make it the perfect moment for a puff on a cigarette. Lying on the tarmac and still strapped in his seat, he would reach for his top pocket, pull out his cigarette packet and ingest the most sublime lungful of nicotine known to man.
The recommendations of the hardened smoker are nothing if not inventive. His cigarettes are a medicine for every ailment, an accessory without which no experience is complete. They function as a regulator of anxiety, a stimulus to productivity and an insurance policy against boredom in all of its manifestations. They represent a pure burst of concentrated pleasure, impossible to replace and (whisper it) cheap at the price. The experienced puffer finds that everything about his addiction takes on magical qualities: the ceremony of lighting up, the accoutrements of his habit, the odour of burning tar. For the determined smoker, good food is the opportunity for an after-dinner smoke and good conversation is mood-music that never drowns out his need for a puff – even passionate sex is only the means to an end: the fumble for a post-coital cigarette.
Cigarettes have long served as a symbol of exchange and a fluid for mediating social interaction. When I worked as a manager of a homeless persons hostel for Southwark Council in south London in the early 1990s, I found myself buying an extra packet every morning: dishing out cigarettes was simply the easiest way to win the respect of homeless residents.
George Orwell, during the lean years that inspired him to write Down and Out in Paris and London, recalled that he would go to parties with only one cigarette in his pack, find a smoker and offer it to them. His recipients, invited to peer into an almost empty pack, would inevitably refuse to take his last cigarette and offer out one of their own, instead. Thus, according to Orwell, could he puff his way through the party and still have a cigarette left for bedtime.
Cigarettes are the only currency available to the prison inmate, the final pleasure accorded to the condemned man. Where governments have called upon the support of their citizenry in time of crisis or war, smoking has turned up in propaganda as a badge of courage under adversity and cigarettes as a morale-boosting ingredient in the rations of soldiers.
To smoke has ever been considered patriotic: in 1920, at the end of a bitter world war, American puritans who advocated the prohibition of tobacco were indicted on the charge of treason.
The cigarette – and the myriad rituals and gestures that accompany smoking – has been an important vehicle for the transmission of meaning and characterisation in films. With the arrival of Humphrey Bogart, the smoker found his most eloquent cinematic ambassador. In Casablanca, cigarettes are ubiquitous and Bogart’s smoking reinforces his calm, steely exterior. The on-screen affair between Bogart and Lauren Bacall developed with the cigarette as a romantic prop and a sexual fetish: from the moment when Bogart lights Bacall’s cigarette in To Have or Have Not, we know this is going to be the beginning of something special.
In Tony Harrison’s modern interpretation of the Prometheus legend, the heat and light that the smoker conjures into being serves as a token of the human impulse to invention and ingenuity. Or smoking can simply be a tribute to the joy of being alive. Asked by a Newsweek reporter what was the most important thing in his life, the existential smoker Jean-Paul Sartre grumbled: ‘I don’t know. Everything. Living. Smoking.’
Whatever the colourful recommendations of the smoker, his habit has fallen on hard times. Tobacco advertising is now either banned or so tightly regulated as to have become cryptic – which seems a shame, given that the vivid imaginations of smokers and their enthusiasm for the product might make for some compelling viewing. The smoker has found himself airbrushed out of contemporary cinema: James Bond, portrayed in Ian Fleming’s books and in the early Sean Connery films as a keen smoker, has long since given up.
Michael Mann’s new thriller, The Insider, which tells the story of a whistleblower, Jeffrey Wigand, and his battles with the tobacco manufacturer Brown & Williamson, opened in Britain on 10 March. The film, which has already created a controversy in the US, has the smoker as the dupe of a sinister conspiracy by tobacco companies intent on covering up the link between tobacco and lung cancer.
Canadian men who still rely on their cigarettes to facilitate romantic introductions will soon have reason to change tack: under the latest proposals by the Canadian government, their packs will be covered with the image of a drooping cigarette, a symbol of the impotence which smoking might cause.
Somewhere in the past 20 years our love affair with the smoker has turned sour. True, those years have also seen exponential advances in our understanding of the harmful effects of smoking. No longer can the smoker claim to be unaware of the potential consequences of his addiction: it is well settled that this habit kills 120, 000 smokers a year in Britain and is the root cause behind 30 per cent of all cancer deaths.
But smokers also know that hostility to their habit goes beyond the available scientific evidence. Remember the busybody who coughed theatrically when you lit up? Most of us took no notice. But now he’s back, and he’s brought all his friends. Together, they want to save us from ourselves.
The latest and most ambitious initiative in the Stop Smoking campaign, cheerfully entitled ‘Don’t give up giving up’, was launched by Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary, in December of last year. Its purpose can have nothing to do with the dissemination of information about the harmful consequences of smoking: those facts are, after all, already in the public domain. Rather, in a multi-media fanfare organised in conjunction with Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) and the BBC, the campaign aims to ‘motivate people to change their behaviour’. Top tips in the campaign literature will be manna from heaven for the jaded smoker: they include asking friends and family to sponsor you to give up, and the peculiar injunction: ‘Don’t just sit there thinking about cigarettes – make yourself useful. Anyway, it is hard to smoke when you’re wearing a pair of rubber gloves.’
Today the smoker stands awkwardly on both sides of the stage in the pantomime of political debate. He is both an insidious perpetrator of air pollution and a helpless victim of powerful multinational tobacco firms.
New Labour MPs have no qualms about telling us how to live, and this government has made the ban on smoking a cornerstone of its policy agenda. Unable to raise the income taxation necessary to make improvements in public services, new Labour has embraced with relish an entirely new form of taxation, one whose sole purpose is no longer to provide public goods, but to prevail against public bads.
The smoker has long been saddled with a punitive tax on his behaviour: now, in return for his tax money, he is presented with a range of anti-smoking initiatives to persuade him to kick the habit.
The issues raised by the war on smoking are nuanced. My preference for a cigarette forms part of a class of desires that, when taken together, play an important and highly contested role in our understanding of freedom. In an essay published 20 years ago, the Hegelian philosopher Charles Taylor took issue with a central foundation of postwar liberal political theory: the idea that freedom should consist of no more than the absence of external constraints on individual desire.
Taylor’s critique of that concept was disarmingly simple. Once the liberal acknowledges that each of us spends our time bound up in a struggle between contradictory desires, and that some of those desires are experienced as qualitatively more noble than others, there emerges the possibility that the uses to which we put our freedom might be self-defeating or plain wrong-headed. Any conception of freedom founded on the maximisation of our brute or immediate desires is, as a consequence, found to be one-sided and impoverished.
There is an important truth in Taylor’s argument. Smoking – whatever its merits – is a filthy habit and most of us want to give up. I take pleasure in my addiction to nicotine while, at the same time, aspiring to a healthier, smoke-free lifestyle.
A philosophy that only registered my immediate desire for a cigarette would look insipid, since few of us are such slaves to desire that we can be said to be unaware of the consequences of our own actions. Standing behind the allure of those preferences is a conscious and responsible human being who weighs the value of alternative courses of action in accordance with a wholly personal set of circumstances and inclinations. But when this truth is employed to justify a government campaign to second-guess our desires and persuade us of the need for more responsible consumer choices, it sends precisely the opposite message: it relieves the individual of responsibility for his actions and makes responsibility for those actions the stuff of good government.
Scolded into submission and forced to reflect on the ugly possibilities presented by his habit, the smoker might yet become a emblem of something more lasting than his packet of fags. Richard Klein, author of Cigarettes are Sublime – a brilliant ode to the pleasures of smoking – eventually falls back on the following argument: ‘The freedom to smoke ought to be understood as a significant token of the class of freedoms, and when it is threatened one should look instantly for what other controls are being tightened, for what other checks on freedoms are being administered. The attitude of a society toward the freedom to smoke is a test of the way it understands the rights of people at large, for at any time, a quarter to a half of all the people in the world are puffing away at cigarettes’.

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If Gladwell is the talk circuit’s equivalent of a rock star, the analogy is doubly appropriate – for in popular non-fiction genres such as business and technology, the economics of books are beginning to follow the economics of the music industry. We are familiar with the sad tales of record companies headed for disaster thanks to people accessing music free from the darker corners of the internet rather than paying for it. As a result, pop stars from Coldplay to Prince have embraced a new kind of business model, which relies on giving music away cheaply or free then looking to make more money out of live performances.
The talking tours of high-profile writers follow a similar logic. While book sales are not suffering at the hands of online piracy in the same way as music and films, they are falling. According to Bookseller magazine, UK book sales in 2008 were down 0.4 per cent on 2007 to 236.9m. So many publishers and writers are looking to the opportunities afforded by speaking. This isn’t easy, as most speaking engagements at public venues pay little or nothing. There is, however, an elite group of authors, particularly those who write about new ideas, technology, work or management (Gladwell is one), who can command huge fees by speaking privately for companies who want their executives to benefit from the best in new thinking.
Such events are by their nature, however, pretty exclusive. David Johnson, a professional theatre producer who has worked with everyone from the playwright Mark Ravenhill to the stand-up comic Stewart Lee, saw a gap in the market for doing things on a larger scale. “The man in the street never gets to see these [corporate] gigs,” he explains. I wanted to bring books that make people think to the widest possible audience.”
Having been involved in a six-week run by the filmmaker and satirist Michael Moore at the Roundhouse in north London, Johnson began to look for other writers whose work he could use as the basis of a stage show. It wasn’t easy: not all writers are natural performers; they are often terrified at the prospect of public appearances, and many of them only agree to appear at literary festivals after their publishers twist their arms.
But some, like Gladwell, do have a gift for performance. When Johnson was planning Gladwell’s London dates last year he advertised him as if he were a rock star or a stand-up comedian rather than an author.
It’s difficult to measure how Gladwell’s performances and all the associated promotional activity might have affected sales of his books. It’s possible that the shows might be taking the place of reading books, that the audience think that they have heard it all on stage. On the evening of Gladwell’s Lyceum event, one cynical publishing insider told me she doubted whether anyone who had paid £20 for a ticket would also fork out around the same again for a hardback copy of Outliers. On the other hand, however, it could be argued that the performances send people to the books, just as hearing a band live can inspire people to go to their back catalogue. Certainly, at the ICA sell-out lectures are accompanied by a huge spike in book sales at the shop.
Gladwell himself worries about what might happen if authors, like pop stars, begin to rely on making a living out of performances and the book becomes a loss-leading profile-booster, a bound “goodie bag” to be abandoned by the audience as they leave the theatre.
“I suspect that the book industry will eventually move in the same direction [as the music industry]”, he told me. “I don’t necessarily think that development will be healthy for books or for society. But I’m not sure what can be done about it.”
As news of Jill Bolte Taylor’s appearance at TED in 2008 spread around the net, there followed a book deal, an appearance on Oprah Winfrey and, no doubt, more talks. But what do the audiences get out of it? Yes, it is easier to listen to Malcolm Gladwell for an hour than to buy and read his book, but there’s something else here too.
When almost everything is available in a digital world of zeroes and ones, the thing that is impossible to duplicate is the intensely involving experience of live performance. The flamboyant talks described above are rarely interactive in the conventional sense; they don’t encourage any kind of formal participation from the audience. Instead, they speak to a desire for an intellectual experience involving enough to soak up all our attention.
That’s why people are still prepared to pay big money for live music, and why people choose to pay £20 for a one-off performance by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s why, in the past two years at the ICA our talks have been accompanied by everything from live butchery to live beard-trimming to the sudden appearance of dancing girls.
One of the talking points of last month’s highbrow Hay literary festival was a performance by the burlesque dancer Immodesty Blaize, billed in the programme as a “dazzling international showgirl superstar”. She also has a book out.