Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

It’s worth remembering again that room full of foreign policy experts who laughed, back in 2000, when President Clinton said that any Chinese attempt to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.” Books with titles like Here Comes Everybody and Virtuous Reality once argued that the internet would lead to a boom in self-organization, even a cultural renaissance. As recently as 2012, it was still possible for a reviewer in The New York Times to belittle the idea, expressed in a book of mine, that the internet could become a tool of control. “Vladimir Putin may yet make her a prophet,” wrote Max Frankel about me, “but so far this century, technology has become a welcome defense against tyranny.”