"The revolution will be Twittered!" declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire? In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder -- not easier -- to promote democracy. Buzzwords like "21st-century statecraft" sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that "digital diplomacy" requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy. Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently liberating and why ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of "Internet freedom" might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole.

The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy

Fiction. "DISAPPEARANCE is a magical tale of the struggle to make sense of a multilayered world in which change is the only thing to be sure of--to hold on to somehow--even when what you're holding is never still, and so making sense means letting go. Here games and game worlds are sometimes a metaphor of sorts, and sometimes more tangibly, technologically actual. Like Cronenberg's strange sci fi reverie, eXistenZ, in which 'real' and 'virtual' are twisted to the point where you no longer can tell them apart, in this novel games do something more than transport you to other dimensions or layers in time and space. They ultimately transform you, and you will never be the same. Then again, it appears that you were never the same anyway, but always other. Reading DISAPPEARANCE, I am other."--Jenny Sunden, author of Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures

Does free information mean free people? At the start of the 21st century we were promised that the internet would liberate the world. In 'The Net Delusion', Evgeny Morozov destroys this myth, arguing that 'internet freedom' is an illusion, and that technology has failed to help protect people's rights.

Poverty is not accident, but design. We are not all equal before the law. And the central message of contemporary ethics is that only some people matter.

"Those who would know Kierkegaard, the intesely religious humorist, the irrepressibly witty critic of his age and ours, can do no better than to begin with this book. [In it] we find the heart of Kierkagaard. It is not innocuous, not genteel, not comfortable. He does not invite the reader to realx and have a little laugh with him at the expense of other people or at his own foibles. Kierkegaard deliberately challenges the reader's whole existence. "Nor does he merely challenge our existence; he also questions some ideas that had become well entrenched in his time and that are even more characteristic of the present age. Kierkegaard insists, for example, that Christianity was from the start essentially authoritarian--not just that the Catholic Church was, or that Calvin was, or Luther, or, regrettably, most of the Christian churches, but that Christ was--and is. Indeed, though Kierkegaard was, and wished to be, an individual, and even said that on his tombstone he would like no other epitaph than 'That Individual,' his protest against his age was centered in his lament over the loss of authority." --Walter Kaufman, in the Introduction

Something has been going badly wrong in America. But what is really happening, why, and what does it mean? Could the US itself now be the greatest threat to the future of the West? What does Joe Biden need to do to get America back on track? In this fascinating account of America today, Patrick Davies, former British Deputy Ambassador to the US, sets out to understand how America, blinded by myths of its own exceptionalism, has failed to tackle serious political, social and economic problems which are exacerbating divisions in its society, poisoning its politics and ultimately fuelling America’s decline. The Great American Delusion asks whether, with global power shifting eastwards, the US can save itself and, with it, the Western world before it’s too late. Patrick Davies worked alongside the Obama and Trump White Houses for five years. He has more than 30 years’ experience of America, its people and its politics.