How Killing the Internet Helped Revolutionaries 90
An anonymous reader writes "In a widely circulated American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made things difficult for sustaining a centralized revolutionary movement in Egypt. But, he adds, the shutdown actually encouraged the development of smaller revolutionary uprisings at local levels where the face-to-face interaction between activists was more intense and the mobilization of inactive lukewarm dissidents was easier. In other words, closing down the internet made the revolution more diffuse and more difficult for the authorities to contain."
As long as we're on the subject, reader lecheiron points out news of research into predicting revolutions by feeding millions of news articles into a supercomputer and using word analysis to chart national sentiment. So far it's pretty good at predicting things that have already happened, but we should probably wait until it finds something new before contacting Hari Seldon.
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Taht's well and good (though sadly incomplete) for Mideast nations, but what of places like, say...
* mostly Hindu India ...and etc ?
* mostly Catholic Philippines, ]South America , Ireland, etc.
* mostly Atheist/Confucian/Buddhist China
* mostly Animistic or mixed-religion nations throughout Africa
* mostly Protestant UK,
May want to skip the whole prayer thing altogether once you start considering that many movements (esp. those of the left-leaning ideological persuasion ) are pretty much religion-free.
Props on
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It's no surprise that people who congregate can be threats to an oppressive regime. In societies with particular fearful rulers weekly prayers (mass, temple, etc) would be the only public meetings not easily suppressed. Stalin got away with it, and it's said that Hitler bought out the ones he couldn't bully. The regimes that don't fully suppress religion (or other gatherings, even sports), can find those places as ignition to chaos, and even committed atheists might find the time to attend the only meeting they can.
Good point, but you yourself missed something overall: Certainly, atheists may congregate under the guise of prayer or such, but we were talking about monitoring news trends. If all you do is have your software eyeball prayer meetings (esp. just those phrased towards the Islamic Friday prayers, since Christians do it on Sunday and others do it whenever), you're going to miss it - which was my entire point.
Even if you're just eyeballing public meetings, you're going to miss it - most revolutionary meetings n
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I don't know about the rest, but the UK is easy: revolution will never happen there. There's never even been anything close to a successful revolution there, and the inhabitants now probably couldn't even imagine such a thing. IIRC, the last "revolution" there was the Northern Rebellion and Pilgrimage of Grace during Henry VIII's reign, and that wasn't much of a revolt, they mainly were just protesting, and then they were such sheep that they were easily slaughtered by the King's soldiers after they naive
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Point of order: Northern Ireland is officially considered to be part of the UK, no?
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Well, that's true, but it's a pretty small part of it. I'm really talking about the main island (Great Britain); Northern Ireland is definitely an exception.
Just give it a little thought (Score:5, Funny)
Just like the Declaration of Independence (Score:5, Informative)
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
It's been recognized for generations that people won't rebel against a government for light reasons. As long as people have food and jobs to keep them busy, they'll tolerate quite a bit of oppression.
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The internet was the least of their concerns, Egypt had a secret police department similar to the Nazi's... usually when something like this happens, revolt is next, see in America, you can sit on your couch and fear the FBI will bust in and take w/e they came for and take you to jail... not a torture chamber, if your going to die because of your government, might as well do something about it right?
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
It's been recognized for generations that people won't rebel against a government for light reasons. As long as people have food and jobs to keep them busy, they'll tolerate quite a bit of oppression.
Indeed -- I think governments in general need a large, complacent middle class, and the Democrats were well on the way to achieving it in the US, until it was undermined by Nixon and the rest of the neo-conservatives who followed after him. Too bad, really -- if the current crop of paleocons and Christian dominionist nutbars have their way, they are going to dismantle all the things that have helped create that large, complacent middle class. If they are successful, America will step off the world stage,
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Anyway, at the time, we had the very wealthy - large plant
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Cuba's been extremely successful with this, as has southern Mexico. Liquor prices are suspiciously low in both countries. Hell, if Oaxaca (s. mexico) stopped protesting about being oppressed, they might get worried they were planning some big revolution.
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Still, there is a slow momentum of dissatisfaction with the US gove
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It seems this pendulum is swinging farther in either direction instead of slowing down to a centrist point so that our leaders can agree on some things and make our society progress.
This demonstrates the weakness of our two party system. When people are dissatisfied with both parties, they really have nowhere else to turn. So they simply turn against whichever of the two has pissed them off most recently. In communist nations, you can vote, but there's only one party to vote for. In America, there's two which really aren't that far apart on most things, despite their efforts to play up and play on each other's minor differences, making us only slightly more democratic...
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Exactly.
People will be perfectly content with whatever happens, so long as they have their Feelies and Orgy Porgies. The government doesn't need to burn books when no one bothers to read them in the first place.
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Feelies and Orgy Porgies
"feelies and orgy porgies"???
Do you also yell at the kids to get off off of your lawn too, Ozzie Nelson?
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Brave New World reference, guy.
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Amazon's all over that shit.
Re:Just give it a little thought (Score:4, Insightful)
The government DID turn off my recreation, and is more than happy to incarcerate me for years on end if I just try to have a little fun. From my point of view, there's very little difference between America banning Cannabis and Iran banning western music/TV.
Here Here (Score:1)
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The difference is that they ban both, and more.
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I'd be up in arms pounding on my congressman's door
I don't actually know where my congressman's door is, and without the internet I'm not sure I'd be able to find it.
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Sounds like a very empty and shallow life if porn and tv shows are the most important things you have.
Pitchfork at the ready (Score:5, Interesting)
If some supercomputer analyzed my public writings, it would recognize that I've been keeping the pitchfork I made out of the old plowshare handy by the back door for some time now. I ate the oxen quite a while back when Monsanto took my fields away, so it's not like I had any other use for it.
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Pitchforks are less effective against predator drones than you'd imagine. Soon the cost of predators will be so low the US government will have one available to kill every single citizen, should the need arise.
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Ah, but that means every single citizen will be able to afford a predator drone of their own!
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Ah, but that means every single citizen will be able to afford a predator drone of their own!
This, in a nutshell, is the serious problem society faces today. Our technology is advancing to the point where individuals can gain power one reserved for nation states. The feared "doomsday weapon" isn't going to be deployed by some trigger happy Cold War general or military accident, it's going to be deployed by someone extremist in his garage.
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Unless they decide that drones don't fall under the second amendment.
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Re:Human Machine (Score:4, Interesting)
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Predicting the future that you can affect (Score:2)
Unless you have a monopoly of that technology and don't use it to predict if your population will revolt, it would not give accurate predictions, as if he predicts something dangerous you will take measures to avoid it. That puts that kind of technology in a gray-to-dark area. Are them instruments of opression for your population or of allied countries? Or to attack/unstabilize another countries if they don't warn about that upcoming events?
If you guess the future and do nothing about it you are somewhat
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It's not even really predicting anything.
*PEOPLE* write those articles. People. People know when shit is hitting the fan. People write about shit hitting the fan escalating to larger shit hitting the fan. That's not a computer predicting anything, that's just a computer reading the news and noticing when *PEOPLE* are writing about escalations in shit-fan collisions in certain areas.
Absolutely none of it is surprising. Most people have been waiting for this to happen in the Middle East for quite some ti
Re:Predicting the future that you can affect (Score:4, Insightful)
And once oppressive governments try to use such predictions to suppress revolutions, the people will learn to adapt and alter their public speech. For instance, after decades of government control of the media, Egyptians were able to use social networking to vent their frustrations. As governments try to suppress/infiltrate social networking, people will turn to other strategies.
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Take away the distractions... (Score:2)
Shutting down the internet had other results (Score:3)
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I suppose. Then again we can see what the state of this 'revolution' has gotten. The fast goosestep towards a theocracy.
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Not surprising as it was likely the most authoritarian of the groups involved. As such, they are likely to be fastest at getting organized.
This is why the Right always seems to have a more coherent direction then the Left, as your more likely to find people accepting authoritarian control there.
Eheh, right (Score:2)
Right: tea party.
Left: Chinese communist party.
Let them both run a country for a while and see how well each country does.
Start date: 2012.
We're seeing this with the BART protests (Score:2)
If BART had left the cellphone repeaters on during the first protest, most of us would have all forgotten about it by now.
As it stands, there are now protests planned every single week into the indefinite future.
Not being able to communicate with their phones has not, it seems, prevented the protestors from using the calendar function on their phones...
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It's very similar to and closely related to the Streisand effect. [wikipedia.org]
Not the Internet as much as people being angey (Score:3, Insightful)
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Agreed.
I've also heard it claimed (On the TV-show Kobra on Swedish public service TV), that it would be more accurate to say these were Al Jazeera revolutions rather than Twitter- or Facebook- or Internet-revolutions, in that access to real journalism (People from the US might want to check out the BBC for an example of what I'm talking about) for the masses had a bigger impact than the speedier communications of whatever percentage of people that would Facebook or Twitter.
I don't know, but it does sound li
What doesn't kill you... (Score:2)
...you know the rest.
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...you know the rest.
Maims you? Scars you? Pushes you over the edge? Makes you a chronic depressive? Cuts off all your limbs, then tortures and kills your family in front of your eyes? Leaves you in a vegetative state? What!?
(ps. I know. I just think it's a silly saying.)
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I don't think the saying is meant to be a universal principle, just a saying. In this case, it's perfectly applicable. Shutting off the internet (long enough to round up the perpetrators) may have killed the movement if it hadn't already reached critical mass; instead the organizers adapted and became stronger for it.
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and that which doesn't make you stronger...
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...may still cost you everything that makes it worth living.
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Then for all intents and purposes, it killed you.
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Hmmm ... laziness doesn't kill you. Does it make you stronger?
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Conservation of energy can have its advantages; but laziness is not an external force. For instance, I would call the intellectual laziness of the unoriginal rejoinders to my comment to be more of a character flaw.
Agree but there's no black or white. (Score:3)
In reality really pissed off people will find a way to fight back. Taking a step back here, ultimately cutting off the communication network is not going to do much because that is not the actual cause, rather a mildly helpful catalyst. It's just an easy target for whoever needs to be seen to doing something, and is getting rather desperate.
Hell, if they cut of my slashdots I'd riot harder.
Ultimately a savvy dictatorship would use internet, the internet after all doesn't care what it's used for it just pipes your data. Certainly governments and influential organisations, political movements etc use misinformation on the internet and it's useful idiot syndrome to great affect (see Fox news lol).
Secretly we all know that facebook, twitter and anything blackberry is actually kind of crap. It's just that everyone else is on them, and they seem to work well enough. There's still no substitution for old school word of mouth for your little uprising, which by some measures is more effective. They can't switch that off.
Awesome concept (Score:3, Interesting)
Even pondering this kind of gently contrarion (as opposed to deliberately provocative or 'egdy') research demonstrates more curiousity and academic honesty than a lot of tenured people show in their entire lives.
I live in Tunisia... (Score:4, Informative)
Predictably, those who used to watch football every Sunday suddenly had nothing to do, and those who were preparing for exams found themselves in holidays... Why not join the riots?
Say what???? (Score:2)
So far it's pretty good at predicting things that have already happened
Just how does that qualify as "prediction"?
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Of course it's good at "predicting" previous events, that's what it was designed to to (and/or was trained by analyzing previous events). If it wasn't good at it, it would be a terrible model. That's not prediction, that's analysis and training. I predict the NYSE will crash on a Monday in Oct 1929, and again on a Monday in Oct 1987. I predict Germany will be on the losing side in both world wars. I predict MS Windows will take 90% of the desktop market despite the Apple Macintosh having nearly a 2 year lea
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That's only valid if the designers only used events and data available prior to that event in their design and training of the model. Using knowledge of later events in the design of the model means it's already being "informed by" the future, so even if you retroactively give it only data prior to a past event, the model itself is influenced by future events. Since it's not really possible to keep well known events that occur prior to the design of the model from influencing it's design, and it might not b
"Science" at its worst (Score:2)
The research about predicting revolutions is awful. I don't understand how some people in social sciences still get to publish these results without even remotely trying to avoid confirmation bias.
If you read the research [uic.edu] linked from the BBC story, you can see that they do indeed have some impressive-looking graphics that show how the media reporting changed prior to some revolutions. That's interesting, but it's completely and utterly useless without also taking random samples from other places and times a
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it's only slightly better than always predicting revolutions whenever you want to make a prediction.
By this time tomorrow we will have a revolution. Another one shortly after that. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the world will undergo 7 revolutions this week alone.
Standing on Zanzibar (Score:2)
Not as good as "The sheep look up," but apropos.
With no internet you got a lot more free time (Score:1)