I AM suspicious of the phrase “21st-century statecraft”. I am suspicious because I can't define it, even though I've listened to Alec Ross speak about it twice. (Mr Ross is the senior advisor for innovation at America's Department of State.) Is it a new kind of state-run broadcaster, a digital Radio Free Europe? Is it a new kind of public diplomacy? Is it a
natural hair new kind of foreign aid, a digital USAID? Is it a quicker, less centralised way of determining America's public response to an international event? Does it signal a focus on the role the internet plays in human rights and international trade?I've now encountered it for a third time, in a profile of
human hair wigs Mr Ross and a colleague, Jared Cohen, in the New York Times Magazine. And I've decided that “21stcentury statecraft” is just a grab-bag; it means all of those things. Some of them are good ideas. Some of them are not. And all they have in common is that the internet exists. Over the last twenty years, industry by industry, young men and women have made a living by saying “You don't get it, old man, this is the internet. Everything's different now.” I don't blame Mr Ross for wanting this gig; it's a good one. (It was mine, once.) The problem with “you don't get it, old man” is that it fails to distinguish what about the new is good, and what is bad, and it often fails to recognise that much of what you can do on the internet is not new at all.Take just one of these ideas: a digital Radio Free Europe. Accurate information is as important now as it was during the Cold War, so of course it's a good idea to distribute that information where the readers are, in social forums on the internet. But now, as then, it's hard to determine how to fund a state broadcaster so that it's both trusted and trustworthy. Radio Free Europe was paid for, originally, by the CIA. Was it therefore tainted? If it was perceived as
celebrity hair wigs such �C and it was �C then it doesn't much matter.Last summer, after the election in Iran, the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled service interruption (and either Twitter or State leaked the request). Iran noticed. As Evgeny Morozov pointed out in an oped in the Wall Street Journal,