Technology Topples Governments

In my two previous posts (Vietnam… and RIAA…) I wrote about how the nature of protest was changing and increasingly we are seeing evidence of this.

Voice telephone calls are no longer the dominate way protests are organized. In the last two weeks we’ve seen democracy blossom in Tunisia principally fueled by Twitter feeds and in Egypt one of the principal causes of the tipping point that brought opposition into the streets were Facebook posts.

Think about how old these tools are. Facebook was founded in June, 2004 and Twitter in July, 2006.

That’s like saying that less than six years after the printing press was invented in 1493 democracy blossomed throughout the world.  But that’s not what happened. Democracies didn’t start to appear until 1776 in the modern era or 283 years after the invention of the printing press.

We’re living in a world where ideas, protests and organized movements are coming together literally at the speed of light – the maximum speed at which a VOIP message travels along an optical wire.

What will the future bring? An untold number of Black Swan events and a world we won’t recognize ten years from now. Better? Yes. But, not for dictators.

However, this brings up the sad question: Does Haiti have enough cell phones to fight Baby Doc?

Tweet