Our Routers, Ourselves

Few things look more dictatorial, these days, than issuing orders to switch off parts of the Internet. Last week, Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, shut down access to Twitter's servers in an attempt to curtail relentless criticism of his government. Unsurprisingly, Turks quickly found ways around the ban-confirming the digital activist John Gilmore 's observation that 'the net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.' On Wednesday, a court ordered the government to lift the ban; for now, Twitter remains blocked. A day later, Erdoğan, undeterred, blocked YouTube as well, after a leaked recording of top Turkish officials discussing military action in Syria was posted there.

The futility of blocking the Internet doesn't stop governments from trying. Even the United States is not immune from the temptation to just shut the whole thing off. In 2010, Senator Joseph Lieberman sponsored a bill that online advocates believed would create a kind of 'kill switch' that would enable the President to unilaterally turn off the Internet. That bill did not pass-but the Communications Act of 1934 has long granted the President power to shut down telecommunications networks under the threat of war. Even today, the Department of Homeland Security maintains what's known as Standard Operating Procedure 303, 'a shutdown and restoration process for use by commercial and private wireless networks during national crises.' The procedure is unfortunately secret, aside from an almost completely redacted document obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center through the Freedom of Information Act. (The Center has filed a lawsuit seeking further details.)

The idea of an Internet kill switch sounds disturbing, but that's because it's presented as a 'switch'-suggesting a binary on-or-off state, in which access to the Internet either exists or does not. In truth, online censorship is never black and white-it has many shades of gray. Every person connected to a global telecommunications network is part of a culture of censorship to some degree. Browsers from Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft routinely block users from reaching Web sites that they deem malicious. Google suppresses search listings for some content that infringes on copyrights, while China's national-level censorship is now basically accepted as a component of the global-telecommunications infrastructure. And, yes, in some nations, a man in epaulets yelling 'Turn it off!' can order his henchmen to unplug all the servers-or, more precisely, to block certain services and I.P. addresses.

Many of us route around this censorship. Sometimes we do it without meaning to, such as by watching an illegal clip on YouTube before a movie studio notices its existence. Sometimes we do it very deliberately, as when Chinese citizens maneuver around their national firewall to read banned content. Every user negotiates this giant, global network in his or her own way.

But not every network is global or giant. Since the mid-nineteen-nineties, the Internet has become what we think about when we hear the word 'network.' But you can have a network whenever you get one device to speak to another. For example, thousands of people in Athens, Greece, have their own mesh network-think ham radio, but for the Internet-where they do all the regular things, like sending e-mail, downloading pirated movies, and chatting, while separated from the rest of the Internet. Similar mesh networking efforts are underway in Africa, and there's even a product for setting up peer-to-peer networks, called the ' mesh potato.'

There are also networks built on top of the Internet, which operate through secured, encrypted channels: networks within networks, like Tor, originally developed to protect Naval communications, which is now the private network of choice for activists and people buying illegal narcotics online; and encrypted virtual private networks (V.P.N.s), which are effectively networks atop the network, and which some Turkish activists are using to circumvent the Twitter ban.

Every time something like the Turkish Twitter shutdown happens, alternative forms of networking become news again. The conversation in the technology press shifts to V.P.N.s, or encryption, or building local, ad-hoc versions of the Internet that live away from the watchful eyes of surveillance systems and can't be shut down. The idea, in short: Let the people have their networks! Given that networked computers are getting cheaper (the Raspberry Pi, a fairly capable Linux server that is smaller than a bagel, can be yours for thirty-five dollars), the people can have their networks.

And they probably should. Because, for all their stated good intentions, Twitter and its ilk are hot, dense, and centralized platforms that aggregate billions of minutes of human attention. It is in the interest of these companies (and the interests of their stockholders) to draw more and more attention. Passionate users, especially celebrities, have created mass followings for their thoughts and ideas. It has been a heady decade, as cultures and peoples have opened up online and found their voices. The global nature of these networks has allowed these companies to grow faster than any others in history. But the mesh networks present another opportunity. One could build, for example, a version of Twitter with just a few hundred people on it, to run inside of the mesh-a small, private social network. If there were thousands of meshes, there could be thousands of Twitter clones running across them. And maybe people could choose, rather than be told, where they would like to be on the continuum of censorship and openness.

Here's why it matters: Erdoğan is hardly alone in his perplexed anger with Twitter. Like the old guard in every industry, the current generation of autocrats has struggled to keep up with social media. But the dictators of tomorrow won't be so wooden-and they will have access to wonderful digital megaphones. This is the darker vision for the future of networked communication: Twitter may provide a voice for the people, but it is at the same time a platform perfectly suited to the creation and maintenance of cults of personality-it mixes up the personal and public in an immediate way that would make any decent minister of propaganda shiver in exultation.

The opening line of John Perry Barlow's 1996 manifesto, ' A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,' sums up the Internet's own mythology: 'Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.' From this point of view, the Internet was supposed to make dictatorships impossible. But as we've learned from the Arab Spring and a host of other digitally-enhanced revolutions, the thrilling story of techno-democratic uprisings doesn't have an upbeat ending. Instead of providing a voice for the formerly voiceless, the infrastructure of the Web may turn out to be the perfect, inexpensive tool for the right kind of demagogue, rather than a network that demagogues switch off to stifle dissent. If that future comes to pass, we may need to fall back on our small, local networks and encrypted connections, because a kill switch will be the least of our problems.

Illustration by Jordan Awan.