Eric Schmidt on technology vs. dictatorship

It's been year-and-a-half since the outset of the Arab revolutions that brought down Zine el Abidine Ben Ali's longstanding regime in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak's in Egypt; three years since the beginning of the Iranian election protests of 2009-2010; and more than three years since the start of civil unrest in Moldova, following the announcement fraudulent parliamentary election results, where protestors' self-organizing via Twitter earned it the media tag "the Twitter Revolution." It's widely accepted by now that these and other pro-democratic protest movements globally would have been impossible without smart phones and social media. But the significance of these technologies to democratization is still a matter of debate.

If it occurred to you to wonder what the view on this issue looks like from the top of the tech industry, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg asked Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

In the broader discussion that followed, Schmidt showed a radical optimism about the interplay of technology and democratic society in the U.S. -- and politically developed countries generally. But on the question of tech's role in translating democratic aspirations into democratic change in autocratic states, he was conspicuously more tough-minded.